Know the site before you pay to survey it
A survey, a flood study and a solar feasibility all cost real money and take weeks — and you commission them one site at a time, before you know which sites deserve them. ATLAS-3D screens any location on Earth in about a minute, from public open data, so the expensive work goes only where it is warranted.
No BIM · no sensors · no account · no data to supply
The problem it removes
Pre-feasibility is the least funded stage of every land decision and the one that determines the rest. Teams routinely choose sites, defend allocations and answer objections using whatever evidence happens to be at hand, because assembling proper evidence costs more than the decision budget allows.
That produces three recurring failures: money spent surveying sites that were never viable; decisions defended with assertions rather than evidence; and residents presented with drawings they cannot interpret, then asked to consent.
What it actually does, measured in-product: São Paulo, Avenida Paulista — 471 real buildings reconstructed with 100% measured height coverage (LiDAR-backed). Port of Koper — 1,272 buildings, terrain −3 m to 20 m, 22,832 kWp of rooftop solar potential, built in 7 seconds. Those are outputs from the live application, not projections.
Who it's for, and the question it answers
Municipalities & planning authorities public sector
"We have forty candidate parcels and budget to properly assess five. Which five?"
Screen every parcel for flood exposure, existing green cover, greenable ground, air quality and street-network density before allocating survey budget. Each result carries its formula and a permalink, so the shortlist is auditable rather than asserted — and an objector, a councillor or an auditor can re-open the exact same evidence a year later.
Builders & developers private sector
"Is this site worth a bid, and what will the planners ask us about?"
See the massing context, the low-lying ground, the rooftop solar case and the surrounding fabric before committing to a land option. The same evidence anticipates the conditions a planning authority will attach — flood, overshadowing, green provision — so they are designed for rather than discovered at committee.
Infrastructure & estate operators ports, rail, utilities, ministries
"Which of our three hundred sites are exposed, and which are worth solar?"
Facility platforms model the buildings you have onboarded. They do not model the ground between them. Screen a distributed estate — depots, stations, forecourts, substations — and rank it, then send the deep assessment only where the screening says it matters.
Community groups & civic organisations participatory planning
"What is actually being proposed near us, and what would it change?"
A 3D view of a real neighbourhood that opens in any browser, with no software to install and no licence to buy — and plain-language indicators instead of planning vocabulary. A residents' association can bring evidence to a consultation instead of only objections.
Why it holds up in a public process
Public decisions get challenged. Most site-screening tools produce a number and ask you to trust it, which is exactly what collapses under scrutiny. Three deliberate design choices exist to survive that moment:
- Every score shows its formula. Flood exposure is "% of terrain within 1.5 m of the zone's lowest point" — stated in the interface and in the exported dossier, not hidden in a model.
- Every building declares where its height came from — an official tag, a LiDAR survey, a shadow measurement, a window count, or a typology estimate. Click any building and it tells you. Anything invented is badged synthetic; anything inferred where no open data exists is badged simulated.
- Every result is reproducible. A permalink re-opens the identical zone, radius and time of day. Two people at opposite ends of an argument can look at the same evidence.
Where a figure cannot be measured, the product prints — rather than a plausible
number. That is the whole posture: it is more useful to a public body to know what is unknown
than to be handed false confidence.
The societal case
The screening capability that saves a council money is the same capability that closes an information gap, because the data is public and the tool is free to open.
| Where it helps | How |
|---|---|
| Participatory planning | Residents see a proposal's real context in 3D without specialist GIS software, a licence, or an account. Consultation becomes legible. |
| Heat & green equity | Green cover and greenable ground are measured per district, so planting effort can be directed to the streets with least canopy rather than the loudest ward. |
| Flood-exposed settlements | Terrain screening reaches places survey budgets never do, including informal and peri-urban settlements. Indicative, but far better than nothing. |
| Community energy | Rooftop solar potential across a whole district supports co-operative and municipal generation schemes, not just single-building business cases. |
| Transparency | Disclosed formulas plus reproducible permalinks make a public decision auditable by the people it affects. |
Said plainly: these outputs are indicative estimates from public open data. They are not a survey, a valuation, an engineering assessment or a flood-risk assessment, and must not be the sole basis for a decision requiring professional certification. They are for deciding where to spend the professional budget. Full detail: Accuracy & limitations.
Pricing
Draft — not an offer. The figures below are [PLACEHOLDER] until the owner confirms them. Do not quote these to a customer.
| Tier | For | Includes | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explorer | Anyone, incl. residents & community groups | Build and explore any district; postcard export; permalinks | Free, permanently |
| Analyst | Planners, developers, consultants | Site scores, zone snapshots, A/B compare, Site Dossier PDF, CityJSON/GLB export | [PER SEAT / MONTH] |
| Studio | Authorities & estate operators | Offline regions on your own host (air-gap capable), municipal layer ingestion, white-label dossiers, integration support | [PER ORG / YEAR] |
Explorer stays free deliberately. A tool that a resident cannot open is not a participation tool, and the community case above depends on it costing nothing to look.
Try it on a site you know
No sign-up, nothing to install. Open a district and judge the output against a place you already understand — that is the only honest way to evaluate this.
Assessing it for an organisation, or need a format we do not speak yet? See Integrate or contact [CONTACT EMAIL].