About
About FreeCodeChecks
FreeCodeChecks turns the slow, manual work of reading municipal sign ordinances into a fast, address-driven lookup — so the people who pull sign permits can spend their time on permits, not on page-by-page code reading.
What we do
FreeCodeChecks automates municipal sign-code research. You enter a street address; we identify the governing jurisdiction, retrieve the relevant sign ordinance, and extract the rules that matter — maximum sign height and area, setbacks, permitted and prohibited sign types, illumination limits, and per-zone variations. Those extracted rules populate a standardized Code Check Form, the same kind of form sign technicians have historically filled out by hand. Every extracted value is tied back to the ordinance section it came from, so you can verify the source rather than take our word for it.
The goal is narrow and practical: take a task that can swallow anywhere from fifteen minutes to several hours per municipality and compress it into a single lookup, while keeping the citation trail intact for the human who signs off on the result.
Who it's for
FreeCodeChecks is built for sign permit technicians, permit expediters, and sign company estimators — the people who need to know what a given municipality allows before fabricating, quoting, or installing a sign. If your job involves reading an unfamiliar city or county sign code to figure out whether a monument sign can be ten feet tall or whether a wall sign exceeds the allowed area for its frontage, this tool is built to do the first pass for you and hand you a structured, source-linked answer.
How we source data
There is no single national database of municipal sign codes, so we draw on several established sources and combine them:
- U.S. Census TIGER/Line — official boundary data we use to resolve a street address to the correct municipality and jurisdiction.
- Municode (CivicPlus) — one of the largest hosts of searchable municipal codes in the United States.
- eCode360 (General Code) — a major municipal-code platform covering thousands of additional jurisdictions.
- American Legal Publishing — another widely used publisher of municipal codes that broadens our coverage further.
For jurisdictions not covered by those platforms, an ordinance can be uploaded directly and run through the same extraction process.
Who runs the service
FreeCodeChecks is built and operated by Emberbyte LLC, a small software studio. We handle the full stack: the data ingestion pipeline, the extraction models, the web application, and the infrastructure it runs on. We are a software vendor, not a law firm or a permitting authority, and we do not file permits on your behalf.
Editorial standards & accuracy
Sign codes are detailed, change over time, and frequently contain language that requires professional judgment to interpret. We treat that seriously. Our standards:
- Every extracted value is linked to the ordinance section it came from.
- Low-confidence or ambiguous fields are flagged rather than guessed.
- We show when a source ordinance was last retrieved, because codes are amended over time.
The information we provide is informational and is not legal advice or a substitute for the official municipal code. Human review is recommended before any result is relied on for a permit submission. You should always confirm the current ordinance and any local interpretation with the relevant jurisdiction before acting.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or partnership inquiries? Email us at ben@emberbyte.io. If you spot an ordinance we read incorrectly, tell us — accuracy reports help every future lookup for that jurisdiction.