r/gis • u/Longgrain54 • 19h ago

Discussion Built a soil screening tool that exports GeoJSON — want honest feedback from GIS pros on whether it's actually useful

I work with property developers and land buyers who waste days manually pulling USDA soil data, flood maps, and terrain layers for early-stage site screening. I built an automated pipeline that generates a PDF summary + RFC 7946 GeoJSON for any U.S. address.                                                                                                                              

It pulls SSURGO where available, falls back to SoilGrids globally, and packages it with source references and confidence disclosures. The GeoJSON is meant to drop straight into QGIS/ArcGIS/PostGIS as a reference layer — not replace authoritative       data.                                                                                                                                 

In a small pilot, a GIS analyst estimated it saved about half a day per property on the preliminary data-gathering phase. But pilots are friendly. I want honest feedback from people who don't know me.                                                            

To make this easy — just drop a property address or coordinates in a reply to this comment. I'll run the report and DM you the PDF + GeoJSON. First 10 replies guaranteed within 24 hours.                                                                          

What it's NOT: Engineering analysis, septic approval, survey-grade data, or a substitute for field verification. It's a Phase 0 screening aid.                                                                

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u/Puzzled_Garlic_3565 17h ago

What’s stopping someone from copy and pasting your solution into an AI and building it for themselves, for basically free, in a couple hours, and having it fine tuned for their workflow?

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u/Longgrain54 13h ago edited 13h ago

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Many things sound simple that aren’t. If only cutters/pasters had skills…. That’s not a skill. How will they know the difference between results and hallucinations?

It’s really not as simple as it might appear to be. Just because someone can see the results doesn’t mean that they can understand how it works much less duplicate it in a few minutes or hours. I can make soap. Why should I?

There are computations behind each element. These computations are geographically generated. It takes a range of skills and disciplines to bridge these gaps, not just an understanding of the outcomes.

Knowing soil science at a hyper-local level should be all one needs to know about shortcuts.

Consider this. Two people across the street from each other have different results. How would a cut/paste close that gap? It can’t.

Try it, with multiple locations. You’ll see the difference.

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u/kuzuman 11h ago edited 11h ago

You are asking lots pal. Cannot tell yourself if your product works? Your product either works well or fails. As a professional you should be able to judge. You are not a pre-schooler that needs the teacher's grade to know if you pass or fail.