Questions & Answers
Licenses & Permits — Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to common questions from building officials, licensing managers, IT directors, and municipal leaders evaluating Civic Licenses & Permits for their Ontario municipality.
Each function — application intake, workflow, plans review, inspection, fee calculation, business licensing, contractor portal, AI intelligence, integrations, identity, and API gateway — runs as an independent service that can be scaled, updated, or modified without affecting others. During spring permit season, the application intake service scales up while the licensing service operates normally. A plans review feature update deploys without touching the inspection app. This independence means higher reliability, faster updates, and the ability to grow incrementally.
You receive the complete, unobfuscated source code for all 11 microservices under a perpetual source licence. Your IT team can modify the code, add custom features, fix issues on your timeline, integrate with your specific systems, and deploy on your infrastructure — without waiting for a vendor product roadmap or paying per-customization fees. You're not locked into a SaaS renewal. The platform is yours to operate, extend, and evolve.
Yes. The platform runs on standard Linux infrastructure with Kubernetes or Docker Compose. On-premise deployment gives you complete control over hardware, networking, and data residency. We also support Canadian cloud deployment (AWS ca-central-1, Azure Canada Central) and hybrid models where sensitive data stays on-premise while compute-intensive services like AI plan review run in the cloud. Your deployment model can evolve as municipal policy changes.
The Mobile Inspector App operates fully offline — inspection checklists, photo capture, GPS stamping, signature collection, and pass/fail recording all function without connectivity. When the inspector reconnects (cellular or Wi-Fi), all data syncs automatically with conflict resolution. This is essential for construction sites with poor cellular coverage, basement inspections, and rural areas. The app stores the complete inspection context locally so the inspector is never blocked.
Core permitting services target 99.95% availability with automatic failover between Canadian data centres (Ontario primary, Quebec DR). Recovery point objective (RPO) is less than 1 hour with continuous WAL-based backup. Recovery time objective (RTO) is less than 4 hours for full service restoration. Online applications received during failover events are queued and processed automatically when services restore — no data loss.
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Our municipal solutions team is available to answer technical, procurement, and implementation questions specific to your organization.