What this does not know.

Federal holidays only

State holidays are not modelled. The eleven federal holidays of 5 U.S.C. § 6103 are computed correctly, including the observed-day rules, but a state that closes for Patriots' Day or Emancipation Day is a state whose business-day count this engine will get wrong by a day. In a state where a deadline lands near a state-specific holiday, verify it by hand.

Deadlines run from the date you record, not from agency receipt

For an emailed request the server records the date it sent, which is as close to the truth as this can get. For a portal submission it cannot know anything: you submitted it somewhere else, and the date you type into mark-submitted is the whole basis of every calculation that follows. Record the real submission date. A week of vagueness there is a week of deadline given away, and it will not be visible later as an error — it will simply be the wrong answer, confidently displayed.

The classifier is a hint generator

It reads acknowledgment, extension, clarification, fee, denial, no-records and release signals out of reply text, using keyword patterns. It is not a determination parser and must not be treated as one. It will miss an unusual phrasing and it will fire on a sentence that quotes a phrase without meaning it.

That is precisely why it never changes a status, why every signal is stored with a snippet of the text that produced it, and why the at-risk appeal deadline is computed on the assumption "if this was a determination" rather than on a belief that it was. How signals work →

Half of these agencies cannot be reached at all

Ten of the twenty-two configured agencies require a portal account or postal mail, and one is subject to no records law. The system tells you so instead of pretending, but telling you is all it can do — the submission is still yours to make by hand, and the tracking only becomes real when you come back and record it.

Fees are not modelled

The system knows that a missed federal deadline bars search fees under § 552(a)(4)(A)(viii) and it asserts that in the overdue letter. It does not estimate what a request will cost, track a fee waiver request, or manage payment. Fee category is recorded in the letter you write, not computed.

It is a single process with a bearer credential

No users, no sessions, no roles. Rate limiting is in-process and per token, which is the right shape for one SQLite file and the wrong shape for a horizontally scaled service. If you run more than one instance of this, the rate limit is per instance, not per token, and you should know that before you do it.

The design of this system takes that seriously rather than printing it as a footer. It is the reason five jurisdictions get no due date instead of a plausible one. It is the reason an inbound reply cannot close a request. It is the reason a portal-only agency produces a 409 rather than a success. In each case the alternative would have been a system that looks more complete and is more likely to hurt somebody.

About this site

A static build with no framework and no third-party requests: no CDN fonts, no analytics, nothing loaded from another origin. Every page carries a narrated, captioned explainer served from this origin, with its transcript printed below it in text. The console at /console/ is the tool itself, carried in whole.

Loop footage is credited on each band. Explainer narration is synthesised (ElevenLabs), and the transcript beside each video is the exact text that was voiced.