ClearWater
Is your tap water safe? Free EPA water quality lookup.
Overview
Type a ZIP code and get EPA violations, lead and copper results, and a plain-English safety grade for any of 148,000+ U.S. public water systems — no account, no paywall.
ClearWater turns the EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System — a dense, relational, deeply unfriendly federal dataset — into a single answer to a single question: is my water okay?
The ingestion layer reconciles water system boundaries against ZIP codes, normalizes violation categories across decades of reporting changes, and computes a defensible letter grade that degrades gracefully when a system has sparse data.
Everything is free and requires no sign-up, which is a deliberate product decision: a public-health lookup that asks for your email is a lead magnet, not a utility.
Where the effort went
The interesting part of ClearWater was never the page templates. It was water systems at 148,000+, and getting the underlying model right so the product stays correct as it grows. That is the part we care about, and it is the part that determines whether something like this is still useful in a year.
It runs on infrastructure the owner controls — source in GitHub, deployment on Railway, DNS and CDN on Cloudflare — with no proprietary platform in the middle.