Looking for a Buildscout alternative?
Buildscout have the cheapest letters published anywhere — 80p to £1 plus VAT — sitting on top of the dearest subscription. Their own pricing page says monthly billing is for FMB and FCA members; for everybody else the commitment is a year, paid in advance, and the cheapest year is £2,998 plus VAT before a single letter is printed.
The short answer
At 100 letters a month, Just Granted is £123 (£1.23 a letter) and Buildscout is £349 (£3.49 a letter). That is £226 a month less — 65%.
We are cheaper at every volume Buildscout publish a price for. The table further down works it out volume by volume, from their published tiers and ours.
£2,998 before the first letter
- The year is paid up front
- Their published local ladder is £2,998, £3,588 and £4,118 a year, and national is £5,988. Those are annual figures billed in advance. The monthly numbers in their column of the table are that annual price divided by twelve, which is how it compares rather than how it is paid: the first invoice is the whole year.
- Monthly billing is a membership benefit
- Their pricing page says monthly billing is available to FMB and FCA members. There is also a £199-a-month FMB offer covering one ten-mile campaign, which is not on the general price list. If you belong to neither body, the annual commitment is the offer. We bill by the month and do not ask what you are a member of.
- The cheap letter starts working only once the year is paid
- 80p is a genuinely low price for a letter, and it is why their column narrows as the volume rises. It also sits on top of a subscription several times ours: across every volume in the table above they are the dearer of the two, and the gap closes without crossing.
What a month costs, at every volume
- Just Granted
- Buildscout Local Standard
| 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 |
| Buildscout Local Standard carried, not re-fetched +VAT Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £274 £10.96 each | £299 £5.98 each | £349 £3.49 each | £399 £2.66 each | £499 £2.00 each | £682 £1.58 each | £899 £1.38 each |
| Buildscout National +VAT Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £519 £20.76 each | £539 £10.78 each | £579 £5.79 each | £619 £4.13 each | £699 £2.80 each | £845.40 £1.95 each | £1,019 £1.57 each |
| The difference Arithmetic | −£235 86% | −£236 79% | −£226 65% | −£216 54% | −£196 39% | −£159.40 23% | −£116 13% |
How Buildscout price it
Monthly billing is FMB and FCA members only; everybody else pays £2,998 to £5,988 a year up front. Excludes VAT. Their local ladder runs Standard £2,998, Growth £3,588 and Pro £4,118 a year; this row is the cheapest of the three, at £1 a letter. There is also a separate FMB member offer at £199 a month for one 10-mile campaign with letters at £1, which is cheaper than anything on the pricing page and is not open to a builder who is not an FMB member. CARRIED from 22 August 2026: re-read on 9 October 2026 (869f1280z) found the page restructured into Standard/Pro tabs feeding a comparison table that now prices the letter at 80p rather than £1, plus a second table re-using the name "Pro" for what looks like a different tier. Which published figure this row should become could not be read with confidence from the static page, so the old numbers are carried rather than guessed at — see the module docstring and the open question on 869f1280z.
Same FMB/FCA monthly gate: £5,988 a year up front, or £499 a month if you are a member. Regional sits below it at £4,788 a year with letters at 85p. The cheapest letters we found anywhere sitting on the dearest subscription — the exact inverse of PlanPost. CARRIED from 22 August 2026 for the same reason as the Local row above: the 9 October re-read (869f1280z) found the National/Regional/Pro comparison table still naming £5,988/£4,788/£4,118 a year, but now at 80p/85p/85p a letter rather than the uniform rate previously read, and which of those maps onto which named tier is a judgement call left for Dan rather than a re-derivation this session made alone.
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 Buildscout do well
Read off their own published pages, on the date above.
- Their letters are the cheapest published rate in this market: £1 plus VAT locally, 80p plus VAT nationally.
- They are part of the Searchland group and sell estimated property values, architect contacts, company ownership and PSC details, and a search across the text of planning documents.
- They are the Federation of Master Builders' lead-generation partner, and FMB members get monthly billing and a £199 package that is not available to anyone else.
What we do differently
- No annual commitment, and no membership required
- We are monthly, you cancel from your own account screen, and there is no trade body you have to belong to for that to be the offer.
- The subscription is the small number here
- Their cheapest published plan is £2,998 a year before a single letter is printed. Ours is a monthly figure you can stop at the end of any month, with the letters priced one at a time on top of it.
- Their prices exclude VAT; ours has none to add
- Every Buildscout figure on this page excludes VAT because theirs does, and it is marked. We are not VAT-registered, so nothing is added to ours at checkout — the figures are compared like for like, and ours is what you pay.
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.
- Their other data. Estimated property values, architect contacts, company ownership and PSC details, and a search across the text of planning documents are all part of what Buildscout sell. None of it is in the table above, on either side. If that data is what you are buying, this is not a comparison of the same thing.
- The annual commitment. Their published plans are billed for a year up front unless you are an FMB or FCA member; the monthly figures in their column are that annual price spread across twelve months.
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 Buildscout?
- At 100 letters a month Just Granted is £123 and Buildscout is £349, so we are cheaper by £226 a month — 65%. Our figure is resolved from the system that bills; theirs was read off their published pricing page on 22 August 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 Buildscout charge?
- Monthly billing is FMB and FCA members only; everybody else pays £2,998 to £5,988 a year up front. Excludes VAT. Their local ladder runs Standard £2,998, Growth £3,588 and Pro £4,118 a year; this row is the cheapest of the three, at £1 a letter. There is also a separate FMB member offer at £199 a month for one 10-mile campaign with letters at £1, which is cheaper than anything on the pricing page and is not open to a builder who is not an FMB member. CARRIED from 22 August 2026: re-read on 9 October 2026 (869f1280z) found the page restructured into Standard/Pro tabs feeding a comparison table that now prices the letter at 80p rather than £1, plus a second table re-using the name "Pro" for what looks like a different tier. Which published figure this row should become could not be read with confidence from the static page, so the old numbers are carried rather than guessed at — see the module docstring and the open question on 869f1280z. Read on 22 August 2026.
- Can I try Just Granted before leaving Buildscout?
- 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.