Looking for a BuildAlert alternative?
BuildAlert's price card is admirably plain: six tiers from £50 to £500 a month, and every one of them works out at exactly £2.00 a letter. Moving up a tier buys more letters at the same rate rather than a better rate, and letters beyond a tier are £2.00 as well. So the question this page answers is a simple one: one flat number against a falling one.
The short answer
At 100 letters a month, Just Granted is £123 (£1.23 a letter) and BuildAlert is £200 (£2.00 a letter). That is £77 a month less — 38%.
We are cheaper at every volume BuildAlert publish a price for. The table further down works it out volume by volume, from their published tiers and ours.
£2.00 a letter, whichever tier you are on
- Sending more does not make a letter cheaper
- £50 buys 25, £100 buys 50, £500 buys 250 — and the arithmetic comes out at exactly £2.00 every time, with anything beyond a tier charged at £2.00 as well. The builder posting two hundred and fifty letters a month pays the same for each one as the builder posting twenty-five. Ours falls as the volume rises, because the plan includes letters and the rate after them is lower than their flat one.
- £50 a month is the smallest published entry
- Below it their own answers point at pay-as-you-go, again at £2.00 a letter. Searching what we hold costs nothing and needs no card, and a single letter at our pay-as-you-go rate needs no plan at all.
What a month costs, at every volume
- Just Granted
- BuildAlert
| Letters posted this month | 25 | 50 | 100 | 150 | 250 | 433 | 650 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Just Granted — the plan Measured | £39 £1.56 each | £63 £1.26 each | £123 £1.23 each | £183 £1.22 each | £303 £1.21 each | £522.60 £1.21 each | £783 £1.20 each |
| BuildAlert Declared — read 9 Oct 2026 | £50 £2.00 each | £100 £2.00 each | £200 £2.00 each | £300 £2.00 each | £500 £2.00 each | £866 £2.00 each | £1,300 £2.00 each |
| The difference Arithmetic | −£11 22% | −£37 37% | −£77 38% | −£117 39% | −£197 39% | −£343.40 40% | −£517 40% |
How BuildAlert price it
Six published subscription tiers, from £50 a month for 25 letters to £500 for 250, plus a pay-as-you-go option — and every one of them prices a letter at exactly £2.00, so the ladder is a straight line and the tier you pick changes nothing. Postcards are £2.50. Re-read on their own pricing page on 22 August 2026: this row used to be the least certain one here, carried from an earlier reading because their page returned empty twice on 19 August. It is not carried any more.
Where a vendor sells tiers this table takes whichever of theirs is cheapest at that volume, which is the reading most favourable to them. Where their price card does not reach a volume the cell says "not published" — we do not extrapolate somebody else's prices.
What BuildAlert do well
Read off their own published pages, on the date above.
- Postcards as well as letters, at £2.50.
- Automated follow-ups after 7 or 14 days or on approval, A/B letter templates, and a daily sending cap you set yourself.
- Planning documents, applicant addresses and planning agent details are included on every tier, with unlimited nationwide campaigns.
What we do differently
- Write the letter yourself, and see the printed page
- The wording, the letterhead and the images are yours to edit in the browser, with an exact preview of the page that will come off the printer.
- Keep as many letters as you have kinds of job
- One for loft conversions, one for rear extensions, one for the letter that goes out when permission is granted, with no limit on how many you keep.
- Council by council, with the date we last read it
- Every council we collect has a page saying what we hold and when we last looked, so the pool you would be writing into is visible before you buy access to it.
What this comparison does not cover
This page compares one thing: what a month of letters costs. Both services sell more than that, and these are the parts that are not in the table above.
- Postcards. They post postcards at £2.50 as well as letters. Every column above is the cost of posting letters.
- Their campaign tools. Automated follow-ups after 7 or 14 days or on approval, A/B letter templates and a daily sending cap are included on their tiers and are not priced on either side of this table.
What we actually hold
We collect 346 council registers often enough to publish a page about each of them. That is counted from our own rows, not claimed — every one of those councils has a page showing what we hold and when we last saw it, and the index lists the ones we do not.
Questions
- Is Just Granted cheaper than BuildAlert?
- At 100 letters a month Just Granted is £123 and BuildAlert is £200, so we are cheaper by £77 a month — 38%. Our figure is resolved from the system that bills; theirs was read off their published pricing page on 09 October 2026 and is true of their page on that day. Their figure excludes VAT; we are not VAT-registered, so nothing is added to ours.
- What does BuildAlert charge?
- Six published subscription tiers, from £50 a month for 25 letters to £500 for 250, plus a pay-as-you-go option — and every one of them prices a letter at exactly £2.00, so the ladder is a straight line and the tier you pick changes nothing. Postcards are £2.50. Re-read on their own pricing page on 22 August 2026: this row used to be the least certain one here, carried from an earlier reading because their page returned empty twice on 19 August. It is not carried any more. Read on 09 October 2026.
- Can I try Just Granted before leaving BuildAlert?
- Yes. The free tier costs nothing, needs no card and has no time limit: you can search every council we collect, save searches and get alerts. Applicant names and addresses are the part you pay for. You can also post a single letter at the pay-as-you-go rate without any subscription.
- How do I check these prices myself?
- Open their published pricing page and compare. Every competitor figure on this page is Declared — read off their own published page on the date shown — rather than Measured, and prices move. If one of ours is out of date we would rather know.
Where these numbers come from
Who publishes this
Just Granted reads the planning register of every council we cover, every week, and posts letters to the applicants for you. A free account searches all of it and posts a letter for £1.45 with no subscription. £39 a month adds the applicants' names and addresses, with 30 letters included and £1.20 each after that.