Every renter deserves peace at home.
An open platform protecting tenant rights through knowledge, documentation, and community — built from personal experience, offered to everyone.
Millions of American renters face housing courts, illegal evictions, and habitability violations every year — alone, uninformed, and without records. The system was never built for them.
Half of U.S. renter households — a record 22.6 million — spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and 12.1 million spend more than half. For renters earning under $30,000, 83% are cost-burdened — leaving nothing for emergencies, legal help, or advocacy.
Source: Harvard Joint Center for Housing StudiesMillions of U.S. rental units have severe or moderate physical problems — mold, broken heat, pest infestations, structural hazards — and most renters don't know how to document violations, file complaints, or respond without risking eviction.
Source: HUD / U.S. Census American Housing SurveyEviction filings fall hardest on Black renters — especially Black women — and on immigrant, elderly, and disabled renters. Eviction is not a housing event; it's a life event with cascading consequences.
Source: Eviction Lab researchSemptify is non-adversarial. We don't fight landlords — we give tenants the knowledge, records, and community they need to stand with composure and clarity. Six functions. One platform. Tenants never pay.
Plain-language explanations of tenant rights — notice requirements, habitability standards, illegal fees, retaliation protections, and more — covering 35 states today and expanding. Accessible to everyone, not just lawyers.
Open the Law LibraryNot every situation is the same. Semptify's research layer helps tenants explore the statutes, precedents, and agency rules relevant to their exact case — without needing to know where to look.
See legal research toolsEvery communication, payment, repair request, and notice — documented, timestamped, and organized. A complete paper trail stored in your own cloud, ready if you ever need it in court or with a mediator.
Start documentingMost tenants have the makings of a record — it's just scattered across phone photos, email threads, text messages, and handwritten notes. Semptify organizes everything into a coherent, chronological record that tells your story clearly.
Organize your recordsTenants are stronger together. Semptify connects renters with their local tenants unions, tenant advocacy organizations, and community support networks — and provides tools for organizing where nothing yet exists.
Advocacy & organizingSemptify's Public Exposure Suite connects tenants to journalists, housing advocates, and elected officials. The Complaint Wizard guides users through HUD, state AG, and code enforcement filings — step by step, plain language, no lawyer required.
File a complaintEvery feature in Semptify answers a specific, real gap in the tenant experience. From the first lease signature to the last day in court.
Housing law in plain English for 35 states and growing. Covers notice requirements, security deposit rules, habitability standards, retaliation protections, and right-to-cure timelines. No law degree required.
Open the libraryYour tenant document vault lives in your own Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive account — not on Semptify's servers. Lease agreements, repair photos, payment receipts, notices: all organized and owned by you.
Set up your vaultEvery event in your tenancy — payments, notices, calls, repairs, inspections, disputes — presented as a single chronological timeline. The clearest possible picture of what happened, and when.
Build your timelineAutomated documentation from your records. Case Builder takes your vault contents and timeline, identifies the strongest documentation, and assembles it into a clear, coherent case narrative ready for legal or advocacy use.
See servicesGuided, step-by-step filing with HUD, state attorneys general, local housing authorities, and code enforcement agencies. The Wizard pre-fills forms from your vault data and walks you through every field in plain language.
File a complaintStep-by-step guidance through the eviction process — from notice receipt to court date. Includes state-specific court procedure guides, timeline calculators, deadline tracking, and response templates drafted in plain language.
Open eviction defensePre-filled legal documents drawn from your vault and timeline. Generates answers to eviction summons, motions for continuance, habitability defenses, and more — with state-specific formatting and instructions for filing pro se.
See toolsPattern detection across public housing court records. Identifies serial evictors, landlords with histories of retaliation or code violations, and systemic practices — giving tenants and advocates actionable intelligence to level the playing field.
Legal research toolsDocument and surface predatory landlord patterns: illegal fees, false security deposit claims, retaliatory lease terminations, habitability cover-ups, and discriminatory practices. Creates a documented record for regulatory and legal action.
Legal research toolsBridges the gap between individual tenants and systemic change. Connects tenants with housing journalists, policy advocates, and legislators. Makes individual stories part of a larger record — with privacy controls tenants control.
Advocacy & outreachAdvanced document processing: OCR of scanned documents and photos, automatic deduplication, SMS and chat import, metadata preservation, and chain-of-custody logging. Turns a phone's camera roll into a clear, credible record.
See servicesFull Semptify functionality in a Progressive Web App — now in active development. Document in the moment — photograph a notice, import texts, check your rights, or access your vault — anywhere, on any device. Offline-capable, installable, fast.
Semptify's storage-based authentication model is a genuine innovation in tenant-facing technology. Your cloud storage account is your identity. Your documents never leave your control — and our standing promise: nothing on our servers beyond what is absolutely necessary and non-identifiable. If that ever fails in production, the project doesn't deserve to run.
You connect Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. There is no Semptify password to create, store, remember, or lose. Your own cloud storage confirms it's you.
Every document, timeline entry, and case record is written back to your own cloud account — timeline data included, held in your own storage. Semptify holds zero personal files. If Semptify disappeared tomorrow, your records would still be exactly where you left them.
Your identity and your records travel with your cloud account. Switch devices, reinstall the app, or share access with a lawyer — your entire tenancy record comes with you, without re-registration.
| Category | Traditional Tenant App | Semptify |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | Username + password on vendor servers | OAuth 2.0 via your cloud storage provider |
| Document Storage | Vendor's database — you hope they're secure | Your Google Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive |
| Data Breach Risk | High — millions of records centralized | Near-zero — nothing sensitive on our servers |
| Data Portability | Export only (often PDF, often incomplete) | Always native — already in your cloud |
| Access After Shutdown | Files may be inaccessible or deleted | Files are in your cloud — always accessible |
| Privacy | Vendor analyzes and potentially monetizes | We process; we don't store; you own |
Semptify is not a prototype. Version 5.0 is a fully async, cloud-native architecture with 20+ tenant-facing tools across multiple tiers — 130+ registered modules under the hood — deployed at semptify.org and open source on GitHub.
Semptify's full codebase is publicly available. Developers, housing advocates, legal aid technologists, and researchers are welcome to contribute, audit, or build on it.
Version 5.0 is deployed and production-ready. With funding, Semptify grows from a proven tool into movement infrastructure — reaching more renters who have nowhere else to turn.
Eviction Defense Module, Document Vault, Unified Timeline, Retaliation Tracker, Case Builder, FEMS, Court Forms System, Complaint Wizard. Version 5.0 deployed at semptify.org.
Know Your Rights Law Library (all 50 states + DC), Litigation Intelligence, Fraud Exposure documentation system, Complaint Wizard refinement.
Marketing and user acquisition, mobile PWA (Semptify Go) public launch, tenant union organizing tools, legal aid organization partnerships, researcher data access, multi-language support.
National housing court data aggregation, policy impact reporting, legislative tool, academic research partnerships, multi-city eviction pattern analysis, and integration with legal aid case management systems.
Semptify was created by Bradley Crowe following a personal navigation of a housing dispute. The experience made clear that the gap between tenants and their rights was not a knowledge problem — it was an access and systems problem. Semptify exists to close that gap, for everyone who faces it after him.
Semptify runs on mission, community, and the conviction that every renter deserves tools that work. Here's how you can be part of it.
Tenants never pay for Semptify. But building it takes real funding. Contributions of any size fund development, legal accuracy review, infrastructure, and the time it takes to do this right.
GitHub Sponsors is our donation channel — one-time or monthly, no account details shared with us beyond what GitHub shows.
Legal aid organizations, housing advocacy groups, universities, journalists, and government agencies — Semptify is built to work with you, not duplicate you. Let's connect.
Developers (Python, FastAPI, frontend), housing law experts, legal aid practitioners, translators, and UX researchers — your expertise directly improves what tenants receive. The codebase is open source and welcoming.
The most important thing you can do is make sure a renter who needs this knows it exists. Share semptify.org with tenant organizations, social workers, community groups, and anyone who works with people in housing difficulty.
Questions, partnership inquiries, media requests, or just want to talk about housing justice and technology — reach us through any of these.