Deposit Hawk
Deposit Hawk helps US renters recover security deposits their landlords illegally withheld — something nearly every renter faces and almost none fight, because they'd never call a lawyer.
Core trick
Extracts deduction line items from a photographed letter with vision, computes owed amounts in code against statute penalty rules, and generates a certified mail letter.
Description
Deposit Hawk helps US renters recover security deposits their landlords illegally withheld — something nearly every renter faces and almost none fight, because they'd never call a lawyer. It's a tool that acts, not a chatbot that answers. You photograph the landlord's deduction letter; Opus 4.8's vision extracts each claimed deduction, checks it against California Civil Code §1950.5 (every citation verbatim from the live statute), and computes the exact amount owed in deterministic code — e.g. $2,000 wrongfully withheld plus up to a 2× bad-faith penalty, up to $6,000. Then it does the things a chatbot can't: generates and mails a real USPS certified demand letter with tracking, prefills the official SC-100 small-claims form, and routes low-confidence items to human review. Spanish-first, mobile-first, free. The output is a filed-ready legal action with cited evidence - not advice.
README excerpt
# Deposit Hawk 🦅 **Get your security deposit back. A tool that *acts*, not a chatbot that answers.** 🔗 **Live demo:** https://deposit-hawk.vercel.app · 📄 [Brief](BRIEF.md) · ✅ [Rubric](rubric.json) · 🤖 Built autonomously with **Claude Opus 4.8** > ⚖️ Self-help document preparation with statute citations — **not legal advice**, and not a law firm. --- ## The problem Landlords sit on billions in wrongfully withheld security deposits. Nearly every US renter faces this, and almost none fight it — because they'd never call a lawyer, and a chatbot can only tell them their rights, not *do* anything about it. Every existing product sells to landlords. Deposit Hawk is for the renter. You photograph the landlord's deduction letter, and it: 1. **Reads it** — Opus 4.8 vision extracts each claimed deduction into structured line items (low-confidence items are flagged for human review, never silently guessed). 2. **Proves the law** — checks every deduction against **California Civil Code §1950.5**, with each citation matched **verbatim against the live statute** (no paraphrasing the law). 3. **Does the math** — computes the exact amount owed in **deterministic code**, cross-checked by a second independent implementation. In the demo: a **$2,400** deposit withheld in full; the tool *allows* the lawful cleaning fee and *flags* an ambiguous water-bill line for review, finding **$1,950 wrongfully withheld** (repainting, carpet, nail holes — all ordinary wear). Because the landlord blew