Bureaucracy wastes days of people's lives on unwritten rules. You take a day off work, queue for five hours, and get sent home because nobody told you to bring two photocopies, or because someone at a desk invented a fee. The rules that matter are the ones not written on the official page.
What exists and what is new
Closest: queue software sold to governments (Qminder), case trackers for single systems such as US immigration forums, and GetHuman for company phone lines. Those either serve the office, cover one system, or stop at the phone line. New: a crowd playbook for every physical office in any country (which window, which documents, real cost, best time) plus live timelines of stuck cases, a personal case watcher and drafted escalation letters.
The data it runs on
Short structured reports from visitors right after their visit, official fee schedules and procedure pages scraped and re-checked weekly, and case timelines users choose to share anonymously. A model clusters reports into a playbook, flags fees that are not on the official schedule, and builds cohort timelines ("applied in August, decided in 6 to 8 weeks") from shared dates.
The mission
Nobody should lose a day to a rule they could not have known. Window 4 turns every visitor's hard-won knowledge into a living playbook for the next person, and makes unofficial fees visible enough that they become hard to charge.
Why people can't resist it
Fear of the wasted trip. One missing copy costs a day's wages. A checklist with "bring 2 copies" is instant relief.
Where am I in the line? Seeing your case against a cohort ("you are 8 days past typical") ends the helpless waiting.
Paying it forward. After a bad visit, people want the next person to have it easier. The contribute flow takes 60 seconds and shows how many people your report helped.
How it works for real
Office graph: offices, windows and procedures seeded from official pages with a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT via OpenRouter) extracting steps, documents and fees into a schema.
Visitor reports: a 60 second form plus optional voice note, transcribed (Whisper class model) and classified by a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek) into window, wait, documents asked, fee type.
Fee checker: each reported charge is matched against the official schedule; unmatched charges are counted as "commonly reported extra" only after 3 independent reports.
Timelines: users share milestone dates; a simple survival model gives cohort ranges and spots stuck cases.
Case watch: read-only status checks on official portals the user links (or reminders to check manually where scraping is not allowed), with retries and fallbacks.
Letters: Claude drafts escalation letters from the case facts and cohort evidence. The user edits and approves; sending uses their own email connector.
Cost per use
Viewing a playbook is cached: under $0.0005. Classifying a visitor report: about $0.001. Drafting one escalation letter: $0.01 to $0.03. Watching one case for a month with daily checks: about $0.05. Free: all playbooks, contributing, one tracked case. Paid ($2.99 a month): unlimited case watch, stuck alerts, letters. A solo builder serving 10,000 monthly users should spend under $60 a month on models plus hosting.
Growth loop
Every playbook ends with "Visited? Help the next person." Contributors get a shareable "Field note" card ("I saved 312 people a wasted trip"). Office pages rank in search for "[office] documents needed", and people share the checklist link in family and diaspora group chats before a visit. The case tracker runs a status check every Sunday across all your family's cases, sends stuck alerts and next-document reminders, and each check adds to the office waiting data.
Risks and guardrails
No names or photos of staff; reports describe roles only, to avoid defamation and retaliation.
Unofficial fees are shown as "commonly reported" with counts, never as accusations; forwarding a report to an official channel needs the user's approval.
All playbooks are general information, with a link to the official page and a "last confirmed" date.
Fixers may try to post "tips" that sell their service: links and phone numbers are stripped, new accounts are rate limited.
Case data is stored encrypted; nothing is sent to an office without the user's tap.
MVP build order
Ten offices in four cities: hand-seeded playbooks with documents and official fees.
The 60 second contribute form and the fee "official vs reported" view.
Shared timelines and cohort ranges for one high-volume office.
Personal case tracker with a stuck alert and a drafted letter.
Share card for contributors.
All offices, fees, timelines and people in this demo are sample data. General information, not legal advice.