FairAccess

What we built

FairAccess (appeals.rowset.co) helps ordinary homeowners find out, for free and in under a minute, whether their county has over-assessed their home, and then sells them a ready-to-file property-tax appeal packet for a flat $79. It runs live in two counties today, Fulton County, Georgia and Cook County, Illinois, against those counties' own public assessment records. A homeowner types an address; the site pulls their parcel and its comparable properties straight from the county, decides whether they are over-assessed, shows them the exact math, and, when the records support it, generates a cited appeal document they file themselves and keep 100% of any savings.

How AI runs the business, as a glass box

The design deliberately splits the decision from the prose, so the system is auditable rather than a black box. The decision (is this home over-assessed, on which ground, and by how much) is made by a reproducible engine over public records: it compares the home to near-identical neighbors on two recognized legal grounds, uniformity and, where sales data exists, overvaluation, normalizes for size where the data allows, and refuses when the comparison is not trustworthy. No language model touches that decision, so every verdict can be re-run and checked against the county. Then Gemini drafts the appeal narrative from only the facts the engine produced, citing each comparable parcel, and a second Gemini pass adversarially fact-checks that draft against the records while a code-level citation guard rejects any invented reference. Both guards must pass before the written argument ships.

Why the fail-safe matters

If Gemini is unavailable, or its self-check is not satisfied, the system withholds the prose and ships the fully-grounded evidence packet instead, built entirely from the county's own records. This is not theoretical: it has fired in production, and the customer still received a complete, filable packet. The product never ships a sentence it cannot stand behind, and it never leaves a paying customer empty-handed. That restraint is the whole point of the glass box.

Why it is honest, and why that is the moat

The single most important product decision is that FairAccess tells people not to appeal when they are fairly assessed, and never charges them. We checked this against the county's own certified values: a fairly assessed home returns "assessed in line with comparable homes," with no purchase offered, and the refusal is enforced at the payment step, not just in the interface. The server will not create a checkout for a home the engine will not stand behind. Incumbent services take 25 to 35 percent of a homeowner's savings and require signing over authority; FairAccess is a transparent flat fee, and the homeowner keeps everything.

Built on Google Cloud

FairAccess runs on Cloud Run and caches every generated packet in Cloud Storage, so a paid customer's document is produced once and served instantly thereafter, under an enforced retention policy. A Stripe webhook pre-warms the packet the moment payment lands.

Category impact: Money and Financial Access

Property assessment is quietly regressive: modest homes are over-assessed more often than expensive ones, yet fewer homeowners appeal than should, because the process is opaque and the expertise costs money. Computed from Fulton County's own records, roughly one in three homes is assessed more than 10 percent above the typical home in its neighborhood. In Cook County, FairAccess routes correctly between the Assessor and the separate Board of Review, the second-chance appeal that opens after the Assessor's window closes and that most tools miss, so a homeowner who thought they were too late can still act. It is Money and Financial Access in the most literal sense: money the county's own numbers say people are owed, put back within reach for $79, with the diagnosis free.

Business viability

The unit economics are clean: a flat $79 with near-zero marginal cost (public records plus a few cents of Gemini), no percentage give-back, and a nationwide expansion path. Every U.S. county publishes assessment records and appeal deadlines roll through the calendar, so there is always an open, urgent market. The engine is jurisdiction-agnostic; adding a county is a data adapter, not a rebuild. FairAccess has made its first arms-length sale to a real homeowner, found organically and shared unprompted with her neighbors.

In one line: an AI that turns a county's own records into a homeowner's fair-tax appeal, and is honest enough to tell you when you don't need one.

Built With

• flask
• google-cloud
• google-cloud-run
• google-gemini
• javascript
• python
• stripe