Nationwide professional planning alerts.
Give Plota a keyword and it watches every planning register in the UK for it, then emails you what it finds.
Watching a street, a town or a council is free, and you can run as many of those alerts as you like. Pro alerts are for when the answer could come from any council in the country.
How Plota Pro alerts differ from free alerts
Pro alerts do everything the free ones do. Four things are theirs alone.
| Free alerts | Pro alerts | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily, weekly or fortnightly email digests | ✓ | ✓ |
| Every record linked to its council source | ✓ | ✓ |
| Watch a council, town, place or category | ✓ | ✓ |
| Up to 10 alerts per email address | ✓ | ✓ |
| One alert covering every UK council | – | ✓ |
| Your own keywords, not our categories | – | ✓ |
| Exclude terms - "holiday lets but not caravans" | – | ✓ |
| Filter by application route - outline, full, prior approval | – | ✓ |
| Filter by stated use class - C3, C4 HMO, E, sui generis | – | ✓ |
| Business premises and the kind of work - new premises, extensions, changes of use | – | ✓ |
| A minimum number of homes - schemes of 10+, 100+ | – | ✓ |
| Commercial use | – | ✓ |
| Planning API and data exports included | – | ✓ |
How our customers are using Pro alerts
Land and development
Teams sourcing sites watch nationally for the application types they buy, rather than checking authorities one at a time.
Consultants and agents
Practices follow their sector across the country and reach clients while an application is still open.
Suppliers and installers
Businesses catch the applications that create demand for what they sell, in the weeks before work starts.
Research and press
Analysts and reporters track a policy question nationally, with every record linked back to its council source.
Included as part of a wider plan
Pro alerts come with a plan that also carries the planning API, scheduled data exports, and the integrations that put records into a spreadsheet, a CRM or a dashboard. If email stops being the right shape for how you work, there is nothing further to buy.
Saved alert feeds: 5 on Starter, 25 on Pro, 100 on Business.
See what else is includedBefore you start
What counts as a keyword?
Any word or phrase you would expect to find in the description a council publishes. Alerts match against that description, so procedural wording stays out of the results.
How often do alerts arrive?
Daily, weekly or fortnightly, set per alert. Each digest carries only what is new since the last one.
Can I run more than one?
Yes. Most people run several narrow keyword sets rather than one broad one, because it keeps each digest readable.
Could I do this with several free alerts instead?
Not for a keyword. Free alerts match by area and by our own categories, so you can cover several councils, but you cannot ask for a word - nor filter by application route, stated use class, or a minimum number of homes.
Does this replace the free alerts?
No. Free alerts stay free and are the right tool for watching a street, a town or a council. Our normalised category alerts are generally the right tool for most homeowners and non-commercial customers.
What do I get besides the alerts?
The Starter plan also carries the planning API and data exports. The alerts and the API are the same plan, not two purchases.
Monitoring a whole estate?
If you run many sites - stores, depots, pubs, client properties - portfolio monitoring watches a radius around every one of them: upload a spreadsheet of sites, route alerts by region to different colleagues, and get digests grouped by site. See portfolio monitoring.