Public data, made usable.

Free civic tools for New Yorkers

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We use public data only.

Open records, never resold.

35m+
Records indexed, free.

We turn open data
into real tools.

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Live on the platform

Five tools, in the field.

Every tool is free, open-source, and designed for community members — not other developers. No PDFs, no logins, no spreadsheets.

Why we built this

The notices kept coming, even after he died.

Overdue fees. Penalties stacked on penalties. Charges no one could explain — addressed to a man who wasn't there to read them.

My grandmother tried to figure out why the city was billing him. She couldn't. The records technically existed on NYC's open data portal — you just had to know which dataset to pull, how to filter it, and what the codes meant. Public, but not usable.

CivicByte lives in that gap. We turn the data the city already publishes into tools a tenant, a parent, or a grandmother can actually use — and we treat the work like it matters, because for someone out there, it does.

— Founding note · NYC, 2025
How it works

An open platform, not a walled garden.

Anyone can contribute a tool. Every submission is reviewed against four standards before being listed — then we help communities find it.

01

Build

Developers, students, and nonprofits build tools on top of public data — free, open-source, and focused on a real civic need.

02

Submit & review

Tools are submitted to CivicByte, then checked against four standards: solves a real problem, free & open, usable by non-technical people, actively maintained.

03

Discover

Listed tools appear in the directory, indexed by topic and borough, so the communities who need them can actually find them.

Get involved

Built something, or stuck on a problem?