About Zeever.ca
Last updated: March 2026
Zeever.ca is a Canadian AI platform that turns public information into clear, trustworthy answers. We started with Toronto building permits because they're one of the most common (and most confusing) things people deal with at city hall.
Founder
Colin Smillie
Founder and Developer
Software developer and product builder based in Canada. Colin builds tools that make complex systems more accessible, with a focus on Canadian public services and open-source AI.
What we do
Ask a question about building permits in Toronto and Zeever.ca will search through official content from Toronto.ca to find what's relevant. It then writes an answer based only on what it found, with citations so you can check the sources yourself.
If the information isn't there, Zeever.ca will say so. It won't guess and it won't fill in the blanks with things it doesn't know.
By the numbers
2,096
Pages indexed
9,689
Content chunks
100%
Groundedness
7
Models tested
Groundedness score from LLM-as-judge evaluation across 12 benchmark prompts. See our research methodology for details.
Zeever.ca vs. alternatives
| Zeever.ca | Toronto.ca search | Call 311 | Hire a consultant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | Seconds | 10+ minutes | 30+ min wait | Days |
| Cost | Free | Free | Free | $100+/hr |
| Citations | Every answer | You find them | None | Varies |
| Availability | 24/7 | 24/7 | Business hours | By appointment |
| Source | Toronto.ca only | Toronto.ca | City staff | Experience |
How it works
Crawl
We regularly pull in pages and PDFs from the building permits section of Toronto.ca to keep our content up to date.
Understand
That content gets parsed, classified, and broken into focused sections. Each one is turned into a vector embedding that captures what it means.
Retrieve
When you ask a question, we use vector similarity search and a knowledge graph of permit relationships to find the most relevant sections.
Answer
An AI model reads the retrieved evidence and writes a clear answer with citations. It only works from what it found, never from its own training data.
What this is not
Zeever.ca is not a substitute for professional advice. Permit requirements can get complicated depending on your situation. For anything important, check with Toronto Building directly or talk to a qualified professional.
We're not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Toronto. We use publicly available content from Toronto.ca to help people make sense of the permit process.
The bigger picture
Toronto building permits is where we started, but the plan is bigger. Zeever.ca is being built as a Canadian AI platform for navigating public services, powered by Canadian infrastructure and open AI models. The goal is to make government processes less painful for everyone.
Technology
We built Zeever.ca without large commercial AI platforms on purpose. No OpenAI, no Google, no proprietary black boxes. Every model we use is open source, and our goal is to run the entire system on Canadian infrastructure so Canadian data stays in Canada.
Right now, we run open-source models through Fireworks.ai for the AI inference layer. Canadian GPU hosting at the scale we need doesn't exist yet, but as that infrastructure comes online we plan to bring inference home too, giving us full data sovereignty from question to answer.
Everything else is already Canadian-hosted: the content database, vector search (PostgreSQL with pgvector), knowledge graph, and the web application itself. And every answer comes with its sources, so you can always verify what you're reading.