Two things people ask for constantly: this month's applications in a spreadsheet, and an email when new ones come in. Getting the spreadsheet used to mean writing code against the API.
Both now come from one form in your dashboard, under Export & alerts. You set the filters once and then choose what to do with them.
Setting the filters
Pick the councils you want, or leave that empty to cover the whole UK. Choose a date range, and say whether those dates mean when an application was submitted or when it was decided. You can narrow further by postcode, by type of work, or by keyword.
The number of matching applications updates as you go. That number is exactly what you'll get, so you can see the size of the job before you spend anything on it.
Download it, or get emailed when new ones appear
The download is a CSV of those applications, newest first. It opens in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets, and every column is explained in the API docs. If your date range goes back before 2026 you get historical records too, as far back as 2016. Downloads come out of your monthly export rows, and the tab shows how many you have left and when they reset.
The alert does the opposite job. It ignores what already exists and emails you when something new matches, daily, weekly, or fortnightly. Alerts are included in every paid plan and don't touch your export rows or API quota. You can have 10 running.
Most people want both: download what's already there to work through now, then leave an alert running so you don't have to remember to check.
Two settings that stop the noise
Keywords match the proposal text only, not the address. Without that, searching for salmon returns every application on Salmon Street. The second setting skips procedural records: condition discharges, certificates, non-material amendments. Both are on unless you turn them off.
Worth being straight about what you don't need to pay for. Our classified categories - the 15 normalised types we sort every application into - are in the free standard alerts too, along with drawn map areas and up to 10 saved areas. If you're watching specific places for your own use, that covers it.
What Pro adds is keyword matching at national scale, and commercial use. A free nationwide alert follows one application type at a time; here you can watch a term like "padel", "battery storage", or "drive-through" across every council at once.
The same alerts appear in My areas
Create an alert in the dashboard and it shows up in My areas, and the other way round. There's one list, not two.
Each alert has an id. That's what /v1/alerts refers to, and it's what you point a webhook at, so an alert you set up by clicking can send application.match.created events into your own systems without writing anything to create it.