It's an easy read: jurisdictions are slow to adopt new software because of bureaucracy. Talk to people who actually run plan review for a city or county, and the real reasons look a lot more reasonable.
A public record isn't optional.
A jurisdiction's review decisions can get appealed, litigated, or scrutinized years after the fact. Every review needs a permanent, defensible record of what was submitted, who reviewed it, and what was decided, one that still holds up and still makes sense five years later. Software built for a private company's internal workflow rarely treats that as a first-class requirement, because a private company doesn't usually need it to.
Departments don't work in a straight line.
A single submittal often needs sign-off from multiple departments (planning, public works, fire, utilities), each with its own timeline and its own reviewer. Software built around one reviewer or a simple approve-or-reject step doesn't match how the process actually runs, and forcing it to fit just pushes the coordination work back into email, which is exactly what everyone was trying to get away from.
Per-submittal fees punish growth.
A lot of review software charges by the submittal or by the reviewer seat. For a jurisdiction handling submittals from dozens of different engineering firms, that turns every new firm and every new project into a new line item. That's a pricing model built for a business chasing paying customers, not a public agency serving whoever shows up with a project on its docket.
Built around how review actually has to work.
BaseLD's jurisdiction side was built around these constraints instead of around a private company's assumptions: full multi-department routing, a permanent structured record of every submittal and decision, and no per-submittal fee.
Most jurisdictions that passed on review software before weren't rejecting the idea. They were rejecting a tool built for someone else's job. BaseLD was built for this one.