Get started

Getting started

Create an account

Sign up with your name and email address. Cadastre emails you a link; the page it opens is where you choose a password and accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. After that, sign in with your email and password, or with a passkey once you have added one in Settings.

Use the data in the app

Create a project for the client or question you are working on.
On MSA Selection, narrow the geographic scope, set requirements (for example a minimum population or a maximum unemployment rate) and add criteria in plain language. Each criterion is matched to the measures described in Datasets, and you approve it before it counts.
The register ranks the metros that pass, and the map shades them by score. Save a snapshot to keep a ranking exactly as it was computed.
On Reports, download the snapshot as a PDF or a PowerPoint deck, or its data as CSV or Excel. Each lists its data sources with the credit they require.

Programmatic access

The read-only API, the MCP server and the CLI are live in beta, free while they are, and need no account for the public datasets: call them with no credential, at 30 requests a minute and 2,000 a day per network address. (The app itself needs an account.)

curl "https://getcadastre.com/api/v1/metros?q=austin"

For higher limits, sign in, with an account that has API access turned on. A new account does not have it yet: write to support@getcadastre.com to ask for it (API access may become part of a paid plan later). Until it is on, Settings makes no API keys for the account and apps cannot be connected to it. There are two ways to sign in:

API keys

For your own scripts and servers. In Settings, under API keys, make a key (you are asked for your password). It starts cad_key_, is shown once, and acts as you in the account you were working in. Send it as a bearer token:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $CADASTRE_API_KEY" https://getcadastre.com/api/v1/me

Keep a key secret, as you would a password; revoke it in the same place. Keys are for scripts you run, not for software or pages other people can inspect.

OAuth

For AI agents and other apps that sign in on your behalf. The app opens your browser, you sign in to Cadastre, choose the account and approve; the app keeps its own tokens and refreshes them, so there is no key to copy. Discovery starts at https://getcadastre.com/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server. Disconnect an app in Settings under Authorized apps. To set up a particular agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot in VS Code, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini CLI, or OpenCode), see Connect an AI agent and the MCP server page.

Each key and each approved app has its own rate limits, and every answer carries the credit its sources require: see API.

The command line

The Cadastre CLI, cadastre, runs screens, rankings and comparisons in the terminal, with the attribution printed under every answer. It works without signing in; cadastre login signs in with OAuth in the browser (or takes an API key) for higher limits:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/waratuman/cadastre-cli/main/install.sh | sh
cadastre metros --state TX
cadastre login   # optional: higher limits

For AI agents and tools

These docs are written to be read by agents as well as people:

Every page is Markdown at its own address plus .md, for example https://getcadastre.com/docs/datasets.md.
/llms.txt lists every page with a one-line description, per the llms.txt convention (opens in a new tab).
/llms-full.txt is the whole of the docs as one Markdown file.

curl https://getcadastre.com/llms.txt
curl https://getcadastre.com/docs/datasets/acs.md

Pages describe the data and its rights; they carry no data values.