Most planning alert services give you a postcode and a fixed radius. That works if your life fits neatly inside a circle, but it usually doesn't. You might want to watch a specific neighbourhood, one side of a road, or two separate areas at once.
Plota lets you draw your exact area on the map. Paint the hexagons you care about, skip the ones you don't, and we'll email you when new planning applications appear inside your boundary.
How it works
Search for a place or zoom into the map, then click Draw area. You'll see a grid of hexagons overlaid on the map. Click or drag to paint them, use the eraser to remove any you don't want, and hit Done when you're happy.
Need to cover a bigger area? Zoom out and use scribble mode - draw a rough outline and we'll fill it with hexagons automatically. You can even draw multiple separate areas in a single alert.
Once you're done, enter your email and choose daily, weekly, or fortnightly alerts. You'll see a preview of your area and can edit it any time from the My Areas page.
Why hexagons?
Your drawn area is stored as a set of H3 hexagonal cells - the same spatial grid system used by Uber for surge pricing and Meta for location features. Hexagons tile uniformly (unlike squares, which distort at different latitudes), so your boundary is precise and consistent everywhere in the UK.