Polis

CONNECTING COMMUNITIES TO INTELLIGENCE THEY DESERVE.

Mission
Make public data usable for the people it's supposed to serve.
Vision
A world where every community has the intelligence to shape its own future.
Launching in Charlottesville, VA

Your community's data,
finally making sense

Polis unifies public data across education, public safety, health, and economic mobility — then lets you ask questions in plain language and get real answers.

You're on the list — we'll be in touch.
Free tier available at launch. No credit card required.
Who it's for

Built for the people who care most

Whether you run a city department or just want to understand your neighborhood better.

Local Governments

Cross-agency visibility, early-warning indicators, and outcome-driven planning — without hiring a data team.

"Show me which neighborhoods saw the biggest change in school enrollment and crime this year."

Nonprofits & Foundations

Defensible impact measurement, data-informed program design, and stronger storytelling for boards and funders.

"How do health outcomes compare in the communities where we operate versus the state average?"

Residents & Advocates

Explore your community with the same data city hall uses — translated into language anyone can understand.

"What's the relationship between SRO presence and school suspension rates in Charlottesville?"
See it work

Ask a question. Get a real answer.

Polis connects data across systems so you can explore patterns that were previously invisible.

polis.community
How have school environment indicators in Charlottesville changed alongside public safety trends over the past 5 years?
Short-term suspensions in Charlottesville City Schools declined 34% between 2019 and 2024, with the sharpest drop during the 2020-21 school year. During the same period, crime incidents in school-adjacent neighborhoods fell 18%.

Schools that adopted restorative justice programs saw suspension rates drop 2.4x faster than the district average, while their surrounding neighborhoods showed a 12% greater reduction in juvenile-involved incidents.
VDOE School Environment Charlottesville PD Incidents Census Demographics
Data coverage

Six domains. One connected view.

We ingest, standardize, and connect public datasets that are normally siloed across dozens of agencies.

Education

Accreditation, assessments, enrollment, school finance, and school environment data from the Virginia DOE.

Public Safety

Crime incidents, arrests, fire calls, and neighborhood boundaries from Charlottesville Open Data.

Health

125+ datasets from the Virginia Department of Health covering communicable disease, vital statistics, and more.

Economic Mobility

Labor force, unemployment, payroll from BLS and income, poverty, and employment from Census ACS.

Elections

Virginia election results from 2000 to 2024 — every race, candidate, and vote count, fully structured.

Congress

Bills, votes, members, hearings, and committee activity spanning the 113th through 119th Congress.

Pricing

Start free. Scale when you're ready.

Be first to see Polis in action

We're launching in Charlottesville first. Join the waitlist to get early access and help shape the platform.

You're on the list — we'll be in touch.
Polis — Connecting communities to intelligence they deserve. · Charlottesville, VA · 2026
Project
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Polis leverages AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

Help Shape Polis

We analyze chat logs to identify data coverage gaps — but your direct input is invaluable. Tell us what data matters most to you so we can prioritize what we build next.

Data Coverage

Coverage Matrix

Current geographic and domain coverage. Each cell represents a live, queryable dataset.

Geography Property Transit Education Budget Economy Health Elections Congress
Charlottesville, VA
Virginia (statewide)
Richmond, VA
Norfolk / Hampton Roads
DC / MD / Surrounding States
Live Coming Soon Planned

Data Domains

Five integrated domains of Charlottesville city data, queryable in natural language through the agent.

More Data, Deeper Insight

Every new geography and data domain we add doesn't just increase coverage — it multiplies the questions you can answer. Cross-domain queries that connect education outcomes to economic trends, or transit access to health disparities, become possible only when these datasets live on the same platform. As we scale, the insight surface grows exponentially.

Expansion Roadmap

Now — Charlottesville
Five core domains live: property records, transit (CAT), education (VDOE), city budget, and economic indicators (BLS/Census). Health, elections, and congressional data in active ingestion.
Next — Virginia Statewide
Scale every domain to cover all Virginia localities. Statewide VDOE data, VDH health records, BLS metro areas, and election results across all 133 counties and independent cities.
Then — Key Cities & Surrounding States
Expand to Richmond, Norfolk/Hampton Roads, and the greater DC metro area. Bring in Maryland, West Virginia, and North Carolina datasets for cross-state comparison and regional analysis.

Pricing

Low Subscriptions. Transparent Usage. No Surprises.

Every plan has two components: a low monthly subscription and a per-use inference charge based on the tokens your queries consume. The subscription covers your account, workspace, and support. The inference charge reflects the actual cost of running your queries — passed through transparently so you always know what you're paying for.

There are no hidden ceilings. Your access never degrades, and you're never forced into an upgrade you don't need. Your cost scales with your usage, and your usage scales with the value you're getting.

Monthly
Annual SAVE 20%
Individual Plans
Lite
$0
forever free
Curious residents, students, journalists
$12 / 1M tokens
  • 150k tokens / month included
  • Single-session memory
  • 7-day query archive
  • 1 concurrent session
  • Community support
Pro
$5
per month
Active researchers, city staff, policy analysts
$10 / 1M tokens
  • Unlimited tokens (pay as you go)
  • Persistent session memory
  • 90-day query archive
  • 3 concurrent sessions
  • Export formats (CSV, PDF)
  • Priority support
Super Pro
$15
per month
Power users, consultants, data professionals
$8 / 1M tokens
All Pro perks, plus:
  • Unlimited query archive
  • Unlimited concurrent sessions
  • API access
  • Scheduled queries & alerts
Scholar
$2
per month
Students, educators, and teachers (.edu required)
$8 / 1M tokens
Same perks as Super Pro

What will I actually pay?

Select your usage profile to see the subscription, usage cost, and estimated monthly total per plan.

Plan Subscription Usage cost Estimated monthly
Estimates assume ~2,500 tokens per query (question + AI response). Actual usage varies with query complexity. All plans include 150k free tokens/month — you only pay for usage beyond that.
Institutional Plans

For organizations that need shared token pools, dedicated infrastructure, or mission-aligned access. All institutional plans include unlimited tokens (pay as you go), persistent memory, unlimited archive, unlimited sessions, exports, API access, scheduled queries, and priority support.

Enterprise
$25
per user / month
City agencies, utilities, regional authorities
$8 / 1M tokens
All Super Pro perks, plus:
  • Shared token pools
Academia
$20
per user / month
Universities, research labs, policy institutes
$8 / 1M tokens
Same perks as Enterprise
Data Partner
$10
per user / month
Transit agencies, school districts, open data publishers
$8 / 1M tokens
Same perks as Enterprise
Non-Profit
$2
per user / month
Community orgs, advocacy groups, civic tech teams
$8 / 1M tokens
Same perks as Enterprise
API Request Costs

Plans with API access pay a small per-request infrastructure fee on top of token usage. Each API call covers an API Gateway invocation, backend processing, and an Athena data lookup — billed by monthly volume with a free tier and a tiered discount as usage scales.

Tiered pricing — pay only for what you use

Monthly Volume Rate per 1,000 requests Rate per request
First 10,000
free tier, included with any plan that has API access		 Included $0.00
10,001 – 100,000
light integration usage		 $0.50 $0.0005
100,001 – 1,000,000
production workloads		 $0.30 $0.0003
1,000,001+
high-volume / pipeline use		 $0.15 $0.00015
Example: A team making 75,000 API calls in a month pays $0 for the first 10k + 65k × $0.50/1k = $32.50 in API fees, plus token usage at your tier's rate. Available on Super Pro, Scholar, and all institutional plans.

About Polis

Connecting communities to intelligence they deserve.

Why "Polis"

polis /ˈpälis/

Greek — "city" or "city-state"

The root of policy, politics, and metropolis. One word that instantly signals civic purpose without being heavy-handed. We chose it because the platform exists at the intersection of data and public life — turning scattered city records into something every resident, policymaker, and researcher can actually use.

The Problem

Public data is technically “public,” but practically inaccessible.

It sits in fragmented systems, disconnected portals, buried in spreadsheets, and locked behind technical barriers that most residents, advocates, and even city staff can't navigate. The people most affected by public decisions — and the people making them — rarely have a way to answer basic questions about their own community without weeks of manual work. The result: decisions get made on instinct, anecdote, or the loudest voice in the room, while the data that should inform them sits unused.

Our Mission

Make public data usable for the people it's supposed to serve.

Polis connects siloed datasets into a single platform and lets anyone ask questions in plain language — returning real, sourced answers instead of guesswork. When a community's own data becomes genuinely accessible, better decisions follow.

Our Vision

A world where every community has the intelligence to shape its own future.

We're starting in Charlottesville, then scaling across Virginia and beyond. As we add more geographies and more data domains, the questions people can answer grow exponentially. The long-term vision is a national (maybe international) civic data platform where cross-domain, cross-regional insight is available to everyone — from a council member preparing for a vote, to a nonprofit writing a grant, to a parent choosing a school. Public data should produce public intelligence.

Team

The people building Polis.

Ckalib Nelson
Founder
Building Polis to make public data genuinely accessible to the communities it's meant to serve. Based in Charlottesville, VA.
GitHub

How It Works

This agent doesn't guess. It queries real city databases in real time and shows you exactly where the answer came from.

You ask a plain-English question
"What's the poverty rate in Charlottesville?"
The agent interprets intent and picks the right data domain
Claude identifies this as an economic mobility question and routes to the Census ACS data in our Athena data lake.
A real SQL query runs against the actual dataset
No pre-written answers. The agent generates and executes a live Athena SQL query scoped to the right tables, filters, and time range.
You get a sourced, structured answer with data notes
The response includes the actual numbers, the years covered, suppression flags for small samples, and which tables were queried.

What makes this different

Grounded in authoritative sources
Every answer comes from live queries against data published by the most reputable public institutions — the U.S. Census Bureau, Virginia DOE, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and local open data portals. No training data, no guesswork.
Transparent sourcing, honest about uncertainty
Every response cites which dataset was queried, what years it covers, and the source agency. When sample sizes are small or values are suppressed, the agent flags it — it never fills gaps with assumptions.
Cross-domain joins
Ask questions that span datasets — "Do neighborhoods with higher property values have fewer parking violations?" — and the engine correlates across domains automatically, surfacing patterns that siloed tools can't.

Responsible AI

Polis uses AI to make data accessible, not to replace human judgment. Here's how we keep it honest.

Data-grounded, fully attributed
The AI doesn't generate facts from its training set. Every answer is grounded in a live query against actual public records, and every response cites the source agency, dataset, and time period. You can verify every claim independently.
Privacy-first, uncertainty-aware
Polis only queries aggregate public datasets — no personally identifiable information is accessed, stored, or processed. When data has gaps, small sample sizes, or suppressed values, the agent flags it explicitly rather than filling in assumptions.
Informs decisions, never makes them
The platform presents data and context to support human judgment — it doesn't make policy recommendations, score communities, or rank outcomes. Every interaction produces an auditable trace of which queries ran and how the response was assembled.

Partnership

We partner with organizations that publish or maintain civic data — bringing it into a platform where it becomes instantly queryable alongside every other city dataset.

Data Partner Track

Data Ingestion
Contribute to the civic platform

Your organization publishes or maintains data with civic value — school metrics, transit feeds, utility records, health outcomes, housing data. Under our Data Partner institutional plan, we ingest your data into our platform so it becomes queryable alongside every other city dataset, instantly accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the public. We handle schema normalization, build automated refresh pipelines, and keep your data current — with full attribution on every query result.

What's included
Schema mapping & normalization Automated refresh pipelines Data quality monitoring Attribution & source branding Public impact reporting Dedicated onboarding & support

Ideal Data Partners

Transit Agencies
GTFS feeds, ridership data, route schedules
Real-time and historical transit data that helps residents, planners, and researchers understand mobility patterns across the city.
School Districts
Performance metrics, enrollment, demographics
Education data that empowers parents, policymakers, and advocates to track outcomes and allocate resources where they matter most.
Open Data Publishers
Government portals, civic tech organizations
Any entity that maintains public datasets with civic value — from utility records to health outcomes — and wants that data to reach a wider audience.

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Account Details

Profile information, email preferences, plan management, and API access keys will live here. More coming soon.

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