When someone submits the sign up form, we use the Google Maps Geocode API to find the coordinates and nearest streets. Every 12 hours, we check if there's any scheduled street cleaning or no parking zones for street occupancy permits near each subscriber's signup location, and if there is, queue an alert to be sent.

During sign up, if a license plate number is provided, then the user is also eligible for "Service 2", real-time alerts. For this, whenever our phone number receives an alphanumeric string from someone who is signed up, we check to see if it's a registered license plate number in our user information spreadsheet. If it is, a text message is automatically sent to the associated phone number to notify that their plate number was texted in. The reportee is then given options to let us know what happened: 1 - moved their car, 2 - got towed, or 3 - not parked illegally. We notify the reporter of the result. If one reporter seems to be reporting plates erroneously (i.e. their reportees respond with "3"), the reporter will be unenrolled in the service.

**Important note: When we receive license plate numbers, we do not share this with any third parties. We do not share this information with police, towing companies, local government, nonprofits, or any private companies.

We download the schedules from city websites or acquire from a city's Department of Public Works through direct outreach. Street cleaning schedules usually come to us in CSV format, with the main columns being a street name, street side, and street cleaning timeframe. We are always looking to expand to other municipalities, across the northeast, United States, and even other countries.

Currently, we collect donations from users and supporters. We are very appreciative of a donation of any size (PayPal here). Donations go towards covering text message and server costs.

For financial sustainability, we are looking to partner with local governments interested in incorporating our automated reminder and real-time text alerts in their street cleaning notifying systems.

Additionally, hopefully in Winter 2023-24 if we get a reasonable number of people signed up and opted into receiving notifications from local artists/businesses (Question #5 in the sign up form), we hope to partner with local artists/businesses and provide geographic-targeted advertising to users that opt into this feature. In this case, local artists/businesses would pay us to advertise to people in their area.

In the meantime, if you have any business model concepts or leads, please get in touch!

We know that we're not the only people passionate about taking down the towing industry, building community, and doing something entrepreneurial. Here are a few specific ways we would love to collaborate: 

1. Help us with advertising! Walk around the Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville streets and post flyers on car windshields. In the words of Ben from Daddy Day Care, "It's really fun." Additionally, we have an incentive system that we would be happy to share more about if you contact us!

2. Help us with branding / website design. We'd like to work with a designer (professional or hobbyist) on these things.

3. Engage in "Service 2" - text us license plate numbers that you see parked illegally.

4. Email us your story of when you got towed and felt like it was a less-than-ideal experience. We want to build a portfolio of such stories to add passion to our ambition of ridding the streets of tow trucks.

In general, we're very receptive to any feedback and ideas you may have. You can always reach out with anything!

We understand that sharing your personal information to a third party requires a level of trust. We don't want a lack of transparency or trust to be an impediment to achieving our goal of a city with less car ticketing and towing. Please review our Privacy Policy, and reach out if you have any questions.