Quick answers about CityInsites for first-time users
It's a budget intelligence platform for municipal staff. You enter a city, and we show you spending breakdowns, peer comparisons, federal grant matches, fiscal health scores, and AI-generated recommendations — all from public data sources.
City managers, finance directors, planning departments, grants teams, and elected officials. It's also useful for journalists, academics, and consultants who work with municipal budgets.
You can search public city data without an account. An account unlocks the dashboard, saved comparisons, grant tracking, PDF report generation, and the AI Budget Agent.
Today, yes — we're in early access. Pricing for cities and consultants will be announced before any features become paid; existing users will get advance notice.
Live APIs (AirNow, Census, Grants.gov, HCD) refresh on every request. Budget data refreshes when cities publish new budgets — typically annually or biennially. Each city analysis shows its source year.
We run an automated per-city audit that flags missing fields, implausible values, and internal inconsistencies. Cities flagged as "broken" are filtered out of the public city dropdown so you can't accidentally analyze a corrupted record. That said — always confirm specific numbers against the city's primary source before making a decision.
Either we don't have a budget extracted for it yet, or our quality audit flagged the existing record as unreliable. Email us and we'll prioritize it.
From the dashboard, click "Compare Cities," type both city names, and hit Compare. You'll get side-by-side spending, revenue, and per-capita metrics with deltas. You can save comparisons for quick reload later.
A composite 0–100 quality-of-life metric blending placemaking investment per capita with the city's air quality index. Higher is better. We show your city's percentile rank against same-tier peers.
It's a city-scoped chat — every question is answered using only the data we have for the specific city you've selected. It's powered by Claude (Anthropic) and is intended to surface insights, not to replace professional analysis.
Yes — under "Tools & Reports," click "Generate Council Report." You can choose what to include (budget summary, YTD spending, variance, AI insights, peer comparisons, tracked grants) and download a polished PDF.
We pull live opportunities from Grants.gov and match them against your city's spending categories and AI-generated investment priorities. Track applications through stages on the Grant Tracker.
Click "Forgot Password" on the login page. We'll email you a reset link. If you don't get the email within a few minutes, check spam or contact support.
Visit "Data Deletion Request" or "Data Export" links in the footer (or send a request to support@citycites.com). We'll process within 30 days per CCPA/GDPR.
Yes — public endpoints are limited to roughly 200 requests per day and 50 per hour per IP. Auth endpoints (login, register) are tighter to prevent abuse. If you hit a limit you'll see a 429 response; wait a few minutes and try again.
Refresh the page first. If it persists, email support@citycites.com with the URL and a screenshot. If you're an admin, check /admin/audit-logs and /admin/data-quality for diagnostics.
We expose an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. In Claude.ai, add a custom connector with URL https://<your-domain>:8080/sse. Six budget tools become available to Claude directly.