Meet Lower — Appeal your property tax. Keep what's yours

Finance

Lower

Appeal your property tax. Keep what's yours.

What Lower does

Lower is the DIY property-tax-appeal workbench for US homeowners. About 60% of US homes are over-assessed by their county; the average appellant saves $500–$3,000 a year in property tax. Services like Ownwell will take a third of that for the next three years. Lower gives you the same workflow in your pocket and lets you keep all of it.

What ships in v1:

— Assessment scanner: snap a photo of the assessment notice from your county. Lower runs on-device Vision OCR to pull out parcel ID, assessed value, taxable value, mill rate, and the appeal deadline. Everything is editable. — Overassessment calculator: enter what your home should actually be worth — by typing the FMV directly, or by entering recent comparable sales nearby. Lower computes overassessment %, estimated annual savings, and projected 3-year savings. — Comparable sales worksheet: add up to a dozen nearby recent sales. Lower auto-computes price-per-sqft, weights closer comparables higher, suggests an adjusted FMV, and exports the table into your appeal packet. — Evidence vault: photograph defects (water damage, cracks, deferred maintenance) and tag them. Each photo carries a caption that flows into the appeal letter as supporting evidence. — Appeal letter generator: 5 bundled state-specific templates (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL — covering ~45% of US homeowners). Lower stitches your data, comparables, and evidence captions into a single PDF, ready to print or email to your county assessor. — Deadline tracker: appeal deadlines, hearing dates, and post-decision follow-ups. Local UNUserNotificationCenter reminders at T-30, T-7, and T-1 days. — State-specific tips: built-in summary of the typical appeal window, the form your county will likely require, and the realistic reduction range homeowners win in that state. Pulled from public-domain state law summaries shipped in the bundle. — Multi-property: handle a primary home, a rental, an inherited house — each as a separate Case with its own timeline. — Privacy by default: no account, no email, no analytics, no third-party SDK, no server. Photos and OCR results stay on your device. — Completely free: no ads, no Pro tier, no IAPs, no "unlock."

Lower is for the homeowner who suspects the county got it wrong, wants to fight it themselves, and refuses to hand a third of their savings to a middleman.

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• Assessment scanner (Vision OCR) — Tap +, choose 'Scan assessment notice', frame the page in the camera, and Lower runs on-device Vision text recognition to pre-fill assessed value, parcel ID, taxable value, mill rate (if present), and appeal deadline (if present). Every field is editable before saving.
• Overassessment calculator — Enter your home's actual fair market value (typed directly OR derived from the comparables worksheet). Lower computes overassessment % = (assessed - FMV) / FMV, estimated annual savings = overassessment * mill rate, and 3-year projected savings. The savings number is the hero of the home screen.
• Comparable sales worksheet — Add up to 12 recent nearby sales. For each: address, sale date, sale price, square footage, beds, baths. Lower auto-computes $/sqft for each comp, weights more-recent and same-size comps higher, and proposes an adjusted FMV for your home. Exports as a table into the appeal packet.
• Evidence vault — Snap or import photos of issues that hurt your home's value: roof wear, foundation cracks, deferred maintenance, dated kitchen, drainage problems. Each photo gets a caption and category. Evidence captions are appended to the appeal letter as a numbered exhibit list.
• Appeal letter generator (5 states) — Five bundled state-specific templates: California (Assessment Appeals Board), Texas (ARB protest), New York (Grievance Day), Florida (VAB petition), Illinois (BOR appeal). Lower fills your data, comparables, and evidence into the right template and exports a single PDF via PDFKit. Print, email, or save to Files.
• Deadline tracker + reminders — Each Case has a per-state default appeal window plus any deadline scanned from the notice. Lower schedules UNUserNotificationCenter reminders at T-30 / T-7 / T-1 days for the filing deadline and for any hearing date you add manually.

Why we built it

About 60% of US homeowners are over-assessed by their county tax authority. The fix — filing an administrative appeal with comparable sales and evidence — is highly structured but completely opaque to the average homeowner. Existing services (Ownwell, TurboAppeal, county-specific tax attorneys) take 25-40% of the savi…

What makes it different

Lower is the only iOS app that combines on-device OCR of the assessment notice, a comparable-sales worksheet, an evidence-photo vault, AND a state-specific appeal letter generator into a single end-to-end appeal workbench — and is the only one that is free with no contingency cut. Ownwell is a contingency-based web se…

Who it's for

Freelancers, contractors, and small-business owners who want their numbers right at tax time without renting a SaaS to do it.

In one line: Appeal your property tax. Keep what's yours.

Try it

See the Lower app page for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use Lower, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.