Fineprint

Fineprint is a tool I built that plans building retrofits in response to New York City's Local Law 97. Local Law 97 is the city's climate law for large buildings. It sets a yearly limit on how much carbon a building can emit and fines the owner for every ton over that limit, and those limits only get stricter as the years go on. It's extremely difficult to identify which upgrades will actually bring a building under its cap without spending more than you need to. That is the problem Fineprint solves.

Demo

Why I built it

I thought of the idea after my uncle told me about the letter he got from the city projecting more than $40,000 a year in penalties on a building he'd owned for three decades, with no explanation of what he was supposed to do about it. As a small business owner in Brooklyn who runs a mixed-use property over his shop, he'd already paid two separate consultants just to tell him he had a problem. Watching him try to make a six-figure decision off a spreadsheet he didn't understand is what convinced me this needed to exist.

How it works

You give it an address and it pulls the building's records, models how the building uses energy based off public records, and builds a personalized retrofit plan that closes the gap for the lowest cost. After building it, I reached out to Inspect Mind AI, a YC-backed construction tech startup who agreed to review the retrofit recommendations for code feasibility as part of a work plan.

Tech stack

• SpacetimeDB

  one live database that doubles as the server, so the dashboard and the agents talk to it directly with no separate API layer

• Front end

  the dashboard you interact with

• TypeScript

  a standalone engine for the retrofit and fine calculations

• Claude

  background workers that study each building and write up its plan

• Clerk

  authentication and sign-ins

• Vercel

  hosting

• NYC open datasets

  the building and energy records