Digital Citizen's Price Inspector

Inspired by the 'E-Commerce Pricing' scraper, this project aims to bring price transparency to a typically opaque sector: municipal services. Drawing a loose parallel to the societal stratification and the control of information seen in 'Nightfall' and 'Blade Runner,' this tool empowers the 'citizen' (the individual) by providing them with crucial, often hidden, cost data. The concept is to build a web scraper that systematically collects data on various municipal fees and permit costs (e.g., building permits, business licenses, parking permits, event permits) from publicly accessible city government websites. Users would be able to input a specific service or permit type and their geographical area of interest (city or county). The system would then retrieve and display a comparative price list, highlighting the lowest and highest costs for that service across the selected jurisdictions. This is particularly niche as current municipal software often focuses on internal city operations, not external citizen-facing cost comparison. Implementation is low-cost, primarily requiring web scraping tools (like Python with BeautifulSoup or Scrapy) and a simple web interface (potentially a free tier on a cloud platform). Earning potential lies in several avenues: 1. Premium Access: Offering advanced features like historical price tracking, trend analysis, or alerts for price changes to paid subscribers (e.g., small businesses, real estate agents). 2. Data Licensing: Aggregated and anonymized data could be valuable for urban planning consultancies, academic researchers, or even real estate developers. 3. Affiliate Partnerships: Partnering with service providers that can facilitate obtaining permits or services in different cities, earning a referral fee.