Drop your lease, the landlord's deduction letter, and your move-out photos. An AI agent powered by Groq reads everything, cites statute, drafts a demand letter, and pre-fills the small-claims form.
Live demo: https://depositback-frontend.vercel.app
Backend is on Render's free plan — it spins down after inactivity, so the first request after a while can take ~30–60s to wake up.
- United States — ~$8B/year in wrongfully-withheld security deposits.
- United Kingdom — 30% of TDS dispute outcomes go partially or fully in favor of the tenant; landlords routinely overclaim.
- Pakistan — no deposit protection scheme exists; tenants in Karachi/Lahore commonly lose 1–3 months of advance to bogus deductions.
The pain is universal. Tenants don't know the law. Landlords do. Asymmetric information becomes asymmetric outcomes.
3 uploads. 60 seconds. A court-ready demand letter with statute citations for your jurisdiction.
| Upload | What the agent does |
|---|---|
| Lease (PDF or photo) | Extracts terms; flags clauses (e.g., a deposit > the AB 12 cap) |
| Landlord's deduction letter | Maps each line item against the jurisdiction's statute |
| Move-out photos | Wear-vs-damage assessment using Groq's vision model |
One-click jurisdiction switching — California, New York, Texas, England, Sindh today; new jurisdictions added by dropping a JSON file in backend/data/statutes/.
| Capability | How DepositBack uses it |
|---|---|
| Tool-calling loop | One agent session calls 5 tools — reads PDFs, analyzes photos, looks up statutes, drafts the letter, pre-fills the court form — via a streaming tool-use loop against Groq's OpenAI-compatible API. The full event stream is visible in the UI. |
| Vision (Llama 4 Scout) | Damage assessment via meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct. Tells "ordinary wear" from "chargeable damage" using the Connell v. Brownstein-Louis Co. (1927) standard for California, plus equivalent rules for the other supported jurisdictions. |
| Kimi K2 orchestration | The main agent runs on moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct-0905, chosen for strong multi-step tool-use across the lease, deduction letter, and statute corpus. |
| Low-latency streaming | Groq's inference speed keeps the live event stream responsive across a multi-iteration agent run. |
| Jurisdiction | Statute | Forum |
|---|---|---|
| California | Cal. Civ. Code §1950.5 (post AB 12) | Small Claims, Form SC-100 |
| New York | N.Y. Gen. Oblig. Law §7-108 | NYC Civil Court Small Claims Part |
| Texas | Tex. Prop. Code §92.101–92.110 | Justice Court |
| England & Wales | Housing Act 2004 ss. 213-215 | TDS / DPS / MyDeposits free ADR |
| Sindh, Pakistan | Sindh Rented Premises Ordinance 1979 (with cantonment-area fallback to the Cantonments Rent Restriction Act 1963) | Office of the Rent Controller |
Adding a new jurisdiction = drop a JSON file. See backend/data/statutes/.
┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ React 18 + Vite SPA (Vercel) │
│ Upload UI · SSE stream · letter renderer │
└─────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
│ HTTPS
▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ FastAPI + asyncio (Render) │
│ - main.py: routes, CORS │
│ - agent.py: Groq streaming + tools │
│ - tools/: pdf, vision, statute, doc, form │
│ - data/statutes/: 5 JSON corpora │
└─────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
│ HTTPS
▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Groq — kimi-k2-instruct (agent) + │
│ llama-4-scout (vision) │
│ streaming tool-calling loop │
└────────────────────────────────────────────┘
git clone https://github.com/mufeezhanif/depositback.git
cd depositback
# install both services
make install
# add your Groq API key (free at console.groq.com)
cp backend/.env.example backend/.env
# edit backend/.env → GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_...
# run (in two terminals)
make backend # FastAPI on :8000
make frontend # Vite dev server on :5173Open http://localhost:5173. Upload your files. Click Run analysis.
System dependency: poppler-utils (Linux: apt install poppler-utils, Mac: brew install poppler). The Dockerfile handles this automatically.
make testRuns the backend smoke tests (no network calls — verifies imports, statute lookup, and document drafting).
Frontend (Vercel):
cd frontend
vercel --prod
# set VITE_API_URL to your backend URLBackend (Render):
cd backend
render services create --name depositback-backend --type web_service \
--repo https://github.com/mufeezhanif/depositback --runtime docker \
--root-directory backend --env-var GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_... \
--env-var FRONTEND_ORIGIN=https://your-frontend.vercel.appThe backend ships with a Dockerfile (poppler installed); health-check is /api/health.
depositback/
├── frontend/ React + Vite SPA
│ └── src/
│ ├── App.tsx
│ ├── components/
│ └── lib/
├── backend/ FastAPI service
│ ├── main.py routes
│ ├── agent.py Groq streaming + tool loop
│ ├── tools/ 5 Python tool functions
│ ├── prompts/ agent system prompt + letter template
│ ├── data/statutes/ 5 JSON corpora
│ └── tests/
├── Makefile
├── LICENSE MIT
└── README.md this file
Phase 2 (next 4 weeks): more jurisdictions (WA, MA, IL, FL, Punjab, Ontario, Scotland, NSW), email send-out with confirmation, auto follow-up scheduler, move-in vs move-out photo comparison, repair-cost market lookup, multilingual UI (Urdu, Spanish), confidence score per claim.
Phase 3 (month 2+): lease pre-signing analyzer, landlord-side product, lawyer-marketplace integration, mobile app, NGO partnerships.
Muhammad Mufeez — BSCS, FAST-NUCES Karachi. Built for the Cerebral Valley × Anthropic Built with Opus 4.7 hackathon (April 2026).
DepositBack is a drafting assistant, not a lawyer. Statute citations are quoted verbatim from primary sources; verify against the live statute before filing. For complex matters consult a licensed attorney. Following the FTC's February 2025 finalized order on AI-lawyer claims, we make no representation of legal advice — only of well-cited drafting.
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