Check the Lease.
An AI tool that reads any US lease in about 15 seconds and flags the legal risk, every flag cited to your state's law. Free for renters and landlords. I led it end to end: brand, interface, AI workflow, and data design, building through Claude. Live, free, and now used by early users. It began as a weekend hackathon build, then I kept shaping it into a real product.
35 pages of legal language. No lawyer, no time.
A lease is 35 pages of legal language, signed by people with no lawyer and no time. The clauses that cost you, an illegal deposit, a vague "as-determined" late fee, an entry clause that breaks state law, hide in plain sight. Check the Lease reads the lease in plain English and tells you what won't hold up, with the actual statute to back it.
"Both sides deserve a fair read."
Brand first. Trust is the product.
I built the brand first: a warm, editorial look (cream, sage, clay, Fraunces italic) with hand-drawn icons. Someone signing a 35-page contract has to trust the messenger before they trust the message.
Reads any US lease in 15 seconds. Cites the actual statute.
Upload a lease, get a plain-English read in about 15 seconds: a health score, every red flag named, the protections you're missing, and the questions to ask before signing. Each flag links to the live state statute. I designed the results to be easy to scan: verdict first, then the lease, then findings ranked by severity.
Two databases underneath. 50-state tenant law and a curated legal-aid directory.
The interactive state map
The visual entry point on the homepage. Click any state to see the tenant laws that apply, the protections renters get, and the local legal-aid services that exist there. Covers all 50 states, DC, and 6 US territories.
The 50-state legal-aid directory
The other database. A curated directory of free legal-aid services for every state, DC, and territory, built because the people most likely to need help are often the least likely to have legal support.
Ask the Lease. State-aware, streaming, no transcripts stored.
A floating chatbot that answers state-specific tenant questions in plain English: notice required for entry in California, deposit caps in Texas, eviction timelines in New York. Streams responses, never stores transcripts. Built for the renter who reads the analysis and has one more question.
The calls that made it good.
Free, not $9.99. I built the full paid tier, then set the price to zero. A paywall capped how many renters it could reach, which was the whole point. Building it proved it works; cutting it was the better call.
Show the problem, not the answer. While it was paid, the free scan proved real problems existed without giving them away: findings appeared as redacted cards. You saw four serious flags on your lease; you could not read them yet.
Cite the statute. Every flag links to the real state code, not a vague "this looks risky." Renters can verify it themselves.
Never store the lease. The file is read and discarded, never saved. For a legal document, that came before any feature.
Where it's at, and what it took.
Live and free at checkthelease.com, covering all 50 states, DC and 6 territories, now used by its first users. This is how I work: take a messy, high-trust problem, turn it into a clear product, and ship something live, with product judgment throughout.
Shipping the first version fast was the easy part. The harder work was the judgment after: what to charge, what to show, what to cut. The live version is better because I kept editing, including removing the paywall I had spent the most time building.
I'm Ishmael. A London designer who ships.
Seven years shipping interfaces, websites and brand systems. The last two running CoverTurn, the studio I founded in 2024. Brand, interface, production code, deploy. I own delivery end to end.
Talking to teams now: agencies, product companies, founders. Bringing the same hands inside the brief. Embedded retainer, founding designer, design engineer. Open to the right shape.
UK time · open to US overlap · available now
Background: A View at Hampstead with Stormy Weather, John Constable, ca. 1830. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Public Domain · CC0.