Ichi was built for the people who deal with building codes every day: building departments, plan review firms, and the architecture and engineering teams that submit to them. Most people who need a permit are not those people. They meet the building department once or twice a year, and the hardest moment is when the correction letter arrives. Ichi Tools are for them, and Comment Letter is the first one.
A correction letter arrives from the city. Before you can resubmit, you need to work through every comment: understand what the reviewer is asking, check the drawings, look up the code, and figure out who needs to do what.
Some comments call for a drawing change. Others ask for information that may already be in your plans. Some need a conversation with the reviewer before you can move forward.
We built Comment Letter to help you sort that out.
Upload your correction letter and the plans you submitted. Comment Letter organizes the comments, checks them against your documents and the applicable codes in Ichi's library, and drafts a response to each one. You get a shared report your team can use to work through the letter.
You can preview results from your own letter for free. Full reports start at $19 per letter, with no account or subscription required.
Know what each comment needs
The first job is understanding what needs to happen.
For each comment, Comment Letter helps you identify:
- What needs a revision, with suggested changes and the relevant sheets.
- What your plans already address, with references you can point the reviewer to.
- What may need clarification or reconsideration, with the code references and reasoning behind it.
- What still needs to be checked, including missing documents or project details.
In the report these appear as four labels: real violation, already satisfied, you can push back, and could not verify. Each drafted response includes supporting references so you and your team can review the reasoning and decide how to proceed.
Done by hand, this is the slow part. A letter with 30 or 50 comments is ordinary, and typing it up, splitting it by discipline, sending it around, and reading every cited section against the sheets takes a firm many hours, sometimes days. Comment Letter does that reading in ten to twenty minutes. And because every citation was checked against the code and your files rather than recalled, you can open the section and the sheet and see for yourself.
Work through the letter together
Share the report with your architect, engineer, contractor, or owner. Assign comments, track what's been addressed, and ask follow-up questions about the letter, your plans, or the cited code.
When your responses are ready, you can export the tracker or download a Word version of the city's letter with your responses beneath each comment.
Comment Letter helps prepare the response. Your team reviews the drafts, makes the drawing changes, and confirms the package is ready to resubmit.
Built on Ichi's code library
Comment Letter uses the same Ichi technology used by building departments, plan review firms, and design teams.
It checks comments against the applicable code edition and available local amendments, alongside the documents you upload. The report links to the supporting code sections and plan references. If coverage or information is missing, it flags the gap.
- Code groups covered
- 269
Code groups covered
- Licensed code books, amendments included
- 3,148
Licensed code books, amendments included
- US states with at least one group
- 29
US states with at least one group
"Being able to ask a question and have it recite a bunch of sections you weren't even aware existed. That's huge."
Eric Schneiderjohn, VP and Supervising Plan Review Engineer, West Coast Code Consultants, on Ichi
That gives you something concrete to bring to your team or discuss with the reviewer.
A little help, when you need it
Comment Letter is the first in Ichi Tools, a new collection of focused tools for specific tasks in the permitting process. Plan Review Readiness, a check of your set before you submit it, is next; the collection lives at ichiplan.com/tools.
We're starting with correction letters because there's a lot of work between receiving one and knowing what to do next. Whether you're managing your first permit or answering letters every week, we want to make that work easier. If you'd rather talk it through with people who read these letters for a living, we opened r/CommentLetter alongside the launch. And if you're a creator or a professional who sends clients our way, there is an affiliate program.
Pricing depends on the number of comments. You'll see the price and a free preview before deciding whether to unlock the full report, and if it wasn't useful, tell us within 14 days for a full refund.
