Let us get the recommendation out of the way first: if you are a homeowner who wants to know when someone lodges a development application near your house, use PlanningAlerts. It is free, it has done this one job well for two decades, and you should not pay us or anyone else for it.
That is not a throat-clearing before a sales pitch. PlanningAlerts is one of the quiet good things on the Australian internet, built and run by the OpenAustralia Foundation, a charity, on donations and volunteer effort. It was scraping council websites and emailing residents about DAs years before "proptech" was a word, and a lot of what exists in this space today, our product included, walks on ground it cleared. If this comparison reads as respectful, that is because we are.
But we run DA Leads, a paid DA data platform, and people regularly ask us what the difference is. "Why would I pay $49 a month when PlanningAlerts is free?" is a fair question that deserves a straight answer. For some readers the answer is genuinely "you should not." Here is the honest breakdown.
What PlanningAlerts does
You give it an address, it emails you when development applications appear near that address. You pick an alert radius around your address, up to a couple of kilometres, and the emails arrive as applications are found. You can read the application, click through to the council, and lodge a comment on applications that accept them, which is a civic feature nothing commercial bothers to build.
The design goal is neighbourhood awareness, and for that goal the constraints are features. One address. A small radius. Everything nearby, regardless of what kind of project it is. Perfect for "what is happening on my street."
Where its limits start
The limits only matter when you try to use it as a business tool, which is not what it was built for.
One address, small radius. An alert watches the area around a single address. If you are a tradie whose work area spans western Sydney, or a builder covering three council areas, a 2km circle around one point does not describe your patch.
No trade or type matching. Alerts include everything: the six-unit development and the neighbour's pergola arrive with equal weight. There is no way to say "only show me demolitions" or "only projects likely to need a concreter." Filtering is your morning reading.
No cost data. Applications arrive without estimated construction value, so you cannot separate the $2,000 job from the $2m one without opening each application.
Coverage is rotting in places, and they are honest about it. PlanningAlerts depends on volunteer-maintained scrapers for each council, and councils redesign websites without warning. Their official authorities page lists around 255 authorities, and at the time of writing roughly 70 of them are flagged "Possibly broken," including some of the biggest planning jurisdictions in the country: City of Sydney, Northern Beaches, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Perth and Hobart among them. Check the page yourself for the current state, it changes as volunteers fix things. None of this is a criticism of the people doing unpaid scraper maintenance. It is just the reality of what donations and volunteers can sustain, and if your suburb sits in a broken authority, your alert is silent and you may not know it.
Commercial use is not allowed on the free tier. This one surprises people. PlanningAlerts' free offering is for personal, non-commercial use. Businesses that want the data are directed to the paid API, where the commercial Standard plan is listed at A$3,850 plus GST per month on their API page. That is not hypocrisy, it is a sensible way to make commercial users fund a charity's infrastructure. But it means "PlanningAlerts is the free version of DA Leads" is wrong in both directions: for personal use it is free and good, and for commercial use it costs 78 times our Pro plan.
What $49 a month buys instead
DA Leads was built for the person the single-address model cannot serve: someone whose livelihood depends on seeing applications across a working area, filtered to what they can actually quote on.
- National coverage, one system. 367 councils across Australia, 858,000+ applications and counting, updated daily. Your patch can be one council or one state.
- Trade matching. Applications are classified so a fencer sees fencing-relevant work and a demolition contractor sees demolitions, instead of everyone reading everything.
- Estimated cost data. Where councils publish construction value, we surface it, so you can sort the pipeline by job size.
- Alerts shaped like a work area. Councils and trades, not a circle around your house.
- A free tier. You can browse and check coverage for your area without paying, and Pro is month to month with no contract.
One boundary to state plainly, because we state it everywhere: we do not publish applicant contact details. No phone numbers, no emails. PlanningAlerts does not either. If you want a leads product that hands you decision-maker phone numbers, that is the expensive end of this market (Cordell Connect, BCI LeadManager) and neither of us is it.
Side by side
| PlanningAlerts | DA Leads | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (personal use) | Free tier; Pro $49/mo |
| Built for | Residents watching their neighbourhood | Trades and businesses working a patch |
| Alert scope | Radius around one address | Councils and trades you choose |
| Trade matching | No | Yes |
| Estimated job value | No | Where councils publish it |
| Coverage | ~255 authorities, ~70 flagged possibly broken | 367 councils, monitored daily |
| Comment on DAs | Yes, a genuinely great civic feature | No |
| Commercial use | Not on free tier; API from A$3,850+GST/mo | Yes, that is the product |
| Run by | OpenAustralia Foundation (charity) | Limon Tech (small business) |
Who should use which
Use PlanningAlerts if you are a resident, an owner, or just civically curious about your own neighbourhood. It does that job well, it costs nothing, and the comment feature connects you to the actual planning process. If you get value from it, donate. Twenty years of free public service is worth supporting whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Use DA Leads if finding DAs is part of how you earn: a tradie or builder prospecting for work, a supplier watching project flow, an analyst who needs the pipeline across many councils. The $49 is not buying data that is secret. Almost all of this is public information. It is buying the hours you would otherwise spend every week checking council portals, plus the filtering that makes the volume readable, plus coverage that someone is paid to fix when a council breaks it.
Use both if you like. Plenty of people do: PlanningAlerts watching home, DA Leads watching work. They are not really competitors so much as two different answers to two different questions, one of which has been answered for free, admirably, for twenty years.
