Partywall

If you're building an extension, converting a loft, or removing a chimney breast in England or Wales, the Party Wall Act obliges you to serve notice on your neighbours — and almost nobody doing it for the first time knows which notice applies, what has to go in it, or how long before work starts it has to land. The usual options are paying a surveyor a few hundred pounds to produce a two-page document, or downloading a template and hoping. Partywall's founder is a surveyor who had watched homeowners struggle with both, and wanted the straightforward cases to be something people could simply get right themselves.

• Answer the first questions first

  Before anyone fills anything in, a guidance section clears up what the Act actually asks of them, with diagrams showing exactly which walls are involved and which neighbours need serving. Party wall geometry is the part people get wrong, and it's far easier to match your situation to a picture than to parse a definition.

• A walkthrough, not a template

  The form asks what you're building and where the wall sits, then works the rest out from the answers. It's built to capture exactly what a valid notice needs, so the legal vocabulary stays behind the scenes and the homeowner only ever describes their own building work.

• Finish the job as a PDF

  What comes out is print-ready: one correctly filled-in PDF per neighbour, emailed over ready to sign and serve. The output is the actual document, not a checklist telling you to go and write one.

• Free, and honest about its limits

  The tool is free to use and says so on the homepage. It's also clear about where a straightforward notice ends and a surveyor's job begins, which keeps it genuinely useful rather than a liability.