Frequently Asked Questions

Zeever.ca is a free Canadian AI tool that answers questions about any City of Toronto service. It searches official Toronto.ca content, finds the most relevant information, and generates a cited answer. It covers building permits, property taxes, recycling, parking, housing, health programs, recreation, city government, and everything in between. It only uses what it finds and never makes things up.

No. Zeever.ca is an independent project. It uses publicly available information from Toronto.ca to help people understand city services, but it is not endorsed by or connected to the City of Toronto in any way.

Yes, that is the plan. Toronto is the starting point. The platform is designed to expand to other Canadian municipalities and eventually provincial and federal government information. The goal is to make navigating Canadian public services easier for everyone.

Yes. Zeever.ca is free to use. There are no accounts, no subscriptions, and no limits on questions. The project is funded independently and aims to remain free for public use.

Every answer comes from official Toronto.ca content and includes source links so you can verify the information yourself. In our internal evaluations using a 100-question benchmark across 16 categories, the system achieves high groundedness, meaning claims are supported by retrieved evidence. That said, the information may not cover every edge case, so always confirm important decisions with the relevant City of Toronto department.

Zeever.ca covers all City of Toronto services available on Toronto.ca. You can ask about building permits, sign permits, tree permits, zoning, property taxes, utility bills, business licences, recycling and garbage, streets and parking, tickets and fines, water and environment, grants and incentives, housing and shelter, health programs, parks and recreation, arts and culture, city government, and more. If the information is on Toronto.ca, Zeever.ca can help you find it.

Most AI tools today run on American infrastructure using proprietary models from companies like OpenAI and Google. Zeever.ca is built with open-source models and aims to run entirely on Canadian infrastructure. The goal is data sovereignty: keeping Canadian questions and Canadian data in Canada, processed by systems we can inspect and trust.

The AI models that generate answers require powerful GPUs to run. Pay-per-token inference services like Fireworks.ai do not operate in Canada yet. Canadian GPU hosting exists for dedicated servers, but there is no easy way to test and prototype different open-source models without committing to expensive hardware. We use Fireworks.ai for inference while we work toward self-hosting on Canadian infrastructure.

Zeever.ca uses only open-source AI models. We do not use OpenAI, Google, or any proprietary AI service. Our current default model is Qwen3-8B, selected after benchmarking 9 open-source models on 100 questions across all Toronto.ca categories. It scored highest on relevance while being one of the smallest and cheapest models tested.

Yes. Zeever.ca does not store your questions, does not require an account, does not use tracking cookies, and does not show ads. Your questions are processed in real time to generate an answer and are not saved afterward. See our privacy policy for full details.