About FreeCodeChecks

What we do

FreeCodeChecks automates municipal sign-code research. You enter a street address; we identify the governing jurisdiction, retrieve the relevant sign ordinance, and extract the rules that matter — maximum sign height and area, setbacks, permitted and prohibited sign types, illumination limits, and per-zone variations. Those extracted rules populate a standardized Code Check Form, the same kind of form sign technicians have historically filled out by hand. Check supporting citations where provided. Coverage and citation detail vary; a missing citation or a planning assumption needs further research.

The goal is practical: organize the available research and make its gaps visible. The report does not replace reading the applicable source or confirming a proposed installation with the reviewing office.

Who it's for

FreeCodeChecks is built for sign permit technicians, permit expediters, and sign company estimators — the people who need to know what a given municipality allows before fabricating, quoting, or installing a sign. If your job involves reading an unfamiliar city or county sign code to figure out whether a monument sign can be ten feet tall or whether a wall sign exceeds the allowed area for its frontage, this tool is built to do the first pass for you and hand you a structured, source-linked answer.

How we source data

There is no single national database of municipal sign codes, so we draw on several established sources and combine them:

• U.S. Census TIGER/Line — official boundary data we use to resolve a street address to the correct municipality and jurisdiction.
• Municode (CivicPlus) — one of the largest hosts of searchable municipal codes in the United States.
• eCode360 (General Code) — a major municipal-code platform covering thousands of additional jurisdictions.
• American Legal Publishing — another widely used publisher of municipal codes that broadens our coverage further.

For jurisdictions not covered by those platforms, an ordinance can be uploaded directly and run through the same extraction process.

Who runs the service

FreeCodeChecks is built and operated by Emberbyte LLC, a small software studio founded and run by Ben. We handle the full stack: the data ingestion pipeline, the extraction models, the web application, and the infrastructure it runs on. We are a software vendor, not a law firm or a permitting authority, and we do not file permits on your behalf.

Ben is responsible for the service. Our sign code guides are published by FreeCodeChecks. The publishing approach below explains how we distinguish source research from a named expert review.

Team

• Ben — founder, engineering and data.
• Ross — sign-industry expert, sets what a correct code check looks like.
• Ryan — advertising and site analytics.

How we publish guides

We use AI-assisted drafting and source research to prepare our public guides. The guides explain research methods and sign concepts; they do not establish what a particular property may install. Worked examples are hypothetical, and references identify the law, standards body, or other primary material behind external claims. A technical recommendation is not a local requirement unless the responsible authority has adopted it.

Publication by FreeCodeChecks does not mean a guide has been personally reviewed by Ross or approved by a permitting authority. A named review is credited only when that person has actually reviewed the article. Use the revision date to identify the version you read, and report a correction through our contact form.

Standards & accuracy

Sign codes are detailed, change over time, and frequently contain language that requires professional judgment to interpret. We treat that seriously. Our standards:

• Cited source material and planning assumptions must be read differently. A default is not a confirmed local rule.
• Automated extraction can misread a value, its sign type, or its zoning scope. A confidence label is not a guarantee of correctness or human review.
• We show when a source ordinance was last retrieved, because codes are amended over time.

The information we provide is informational and is not legal advice or a substitute for the official municipal code. Human review is recommended before any result is relied on for a permit submission. You should always confirm the current ordinance and any local interpretation with the relevant jurisdiction before acting.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or partnership inquiries? Get in touch through our contact form. If you spot an ordinance we read incorrectly, tell us — accuracy reports help every future lookup for that jurisdiction.