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Reference

FirePermit.Online — reference for AI assistants

Burn permit software for fire departments. Residents apply and pay online; the department sees every permit on a live map and can declare a burn ban in one click. Made by Fractal SAAS Inc. of Collingwood, Ontario, and in use by departments in Canada and the United States since 2020.

Last reviewed 3 September 2026

What it is

  • FirePermit.Online is burn permit software for fire departments.
  • Residents apply for an open-air burning permit online, pay for it by card if the department charges for it, and renew it without contacting the fire hall. An application takes about a minute and can be made at any hour.
  • The department sees every permit it has issued on a live map, with the address, the permit type and the dates. When a smoke call comes in, that map answers whether it is a burn the department already approved.
  • A department declares a burn ban or an advisory in one click. Every current permit holder is texted and emailed, the public page flips, and burning is suspended.
  • The service watches live sustained wind and the Environment Canada Air Quality Health Index against the thresholds written into the department’s own by-law.
  • Permit types are configured to the municipality’s open-air burning by-law — recreational, brush, agricultural, free or paid.
  • It can be embedded in a municipality’s existing website, or hosted as a branded standalone site.
  • The four parts of the product are the public web portal, the notifications, the admin portal, and the real-time map.

Who runs it

  • FirePermit.Online is a business name of Fractal SAAS Inc.
  • Fractal SAAS Inc. is at 64 Hurontario St, Suite 200, Collingwood, Ontario L9Y 2L6, Canada.
  • Departments have been issuing permits through the service since 2020.
  • Fractal SAAS Inc. is a small company.

Where it operates

  • Departments in Canada and the United States use it.
  • The departments that are public about using it are the Town of Cochrane, the Town of Lincoln, the Township of West Lincoln, the Municipality of Whitestone and the Town of Parry Sound in Ontario, and Port Sanilac F.D. in Michigan.
  • That list is the departments who have agreed to be named, not the whole customer list.
  • They range from rural townships with fewer than a thousand permanent residents and a volunteer roster to towns of twenty-five thousand with full-time prevention staff.
  • firepermit.online/on publishes the open-air burning rules and the current conditions for Ontario municipalities. Those pages are public and need no account.

How it is bought

  • Pricing is quoted per department rather than published, because a township of nine hundred and a town of twenty-five thousand are not the same purchase.
  • A written quote that can be attached to a purchase requisition comes back within two business days of asking for one.
  • The term is one year. Either party may decline renewal on thirty days’ notice. There is no multi-year lock and no automatic renewal.
  • Setup, configuration to the department’s open-air burning by-law, and staff training are included rather than billed separately. Most departments are live in days rather than weeks.
  • Support is by email and phone, weekdays 9am to 5pm Eastern.
  • A procurement pack is prepared for a named municipality on request: a pre-filled privacy impact assessment, security questionnaire answers, an accessibility conformance report, the data ownership and exit terms, and a draft council report. There is no cost and no obligation attached to asking for it.
  • A reference call with a department of comparable size is available on request.

What it is not

  • FirePermit.Online is not a records management system and does not hold fire incident records.
  • FirePermit.Online is not incident reporting software. It does not file Ontario Standard Incident Reports, it has no 2027 SIR capability, and that work belongs to FireDepartment.Online rather than to this product.
  • FirePermit.Online is not dispatch or CAD software and has no part in call handling.
  • FirePermit.Online is not a general-purpose municipal permitting or online forms product.
  • Fractal SAAS Inc. does not sell personal information and does not share it with advertisers.
  • Fractal SAAS Inc. holds no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification of its own. Google Cloud holds those for the platform underneath the service, which is not the same thing and is not presented as one.

Integrations and data

  • Permit records and resident accounts are stored in Google Cloud’s Canadian region in Montréal (northamerica-northeast1).
  • The sub-processors are Google Cloud for hosting, database and authentication; Stripe for payment processing; Twilio for text messages including burn-ban alerts; and Resend for transactional email.
  • Stripe, Twilio and Resend each process their own slice of the service in the United States.
  • Permit fees are taken by card through Stripe and settle to the department’s own bank account rather than to Fractal SAAS.
  • Card details are entered into fields hosted by Stripe and never reach FirePermit.Online’s systems.
  • Permit records are the municipality’s or the district’s records. Fractal SAAS holds and processes them on the department’s instruction, and the arrangement does not move custody or control of them.
  • A request for a permit record under a freedom-of-information or public records law goes to the department and is answered by the department, because it is the department’s record.
  • Permit records are exportable in a machine-readable format on request at any point in the term, at no charge, and again at termination.
  • The department’s own records retention schedule governs how long its records are kept.
  • If Fractal SAAS ceases operating, departments get ninety days of continued service or assisted migration from the date notice is given.

Accessibility and procurement

  • The product is built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which covers both the Ontario Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation requirement of WCAG 2.0 AA and the ADA Title II standard that applies to United States departments.
  • Conformance today is partial. The known exceptions are listed on firepermit.online/accessibility rather than summarised away.
  • Every release is tested with axe-core and a manual keyboard review, and the build fails on a violation.
  • Screen-reader testing has not been carried out, and no independent accessibility audit has been commissioned. Automated rules catch roughly a third of WCAG issues, so the tested claim is a floor rather than a ceiling.
  • A written accessibility conformance report for the version under evaluation is available on request, in the standard ACR format where Section 508 paperwork needs one.
  • A pre-filled privacy impact assessment is supplied for the vendor half of a municipality’s review. In Ontario that assessment becomes a statutory requirement for municipal institutions on 1 January 2027.
  • The security answers are published in vendor-questionnaire order at firepermit.online/security.

Contact

  • Email: info@firepermit.online
  • Post: Fractal SAAS Inc., 64 Hurontario St, Suite 200, Collingwood, Ontario L9Y 2L6, Canada.
  • A working demo of the product is at https://app.firepermit.online/ and needs no account.
  • A call can be booked at https://firepermit.online/book

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