Civic texting and legislative data, built and run by four engineers.

2017 A text message becomes a delivered letter

A person texts RESIST to 50409, and the message becomes a letter in front of their own elected officials. It works on the phone they already have.

Resistbot launched in February 2017 on that one idea and spread within days. Volunteers helped build the first version, and 41 people committed code to the first backend. We started on EFF’s form-filler and began replacing it by December.

“The whole thing takes about two minutes.” CBS Pittsburgh, May 2017

Text RESIST to 50409, or message us on iMessage. resist.bot

2018 We deliver to every kind of office

Every office takes mail its own way, and the rules change without notice. Our delivery system handles web forms, the congressional APIs, email, fax, and postal mail, and it sends each letter by the route its office accepts.

Today it reads about 870 contact-form definitions and tells six kinds of CAPTCHA apart. Behind it is our directory of officials, including the seats that don’t fit the usual pattern. New Hampshire has 43 floterial districts laid over its ordinary ones. Idaho elects an A seat and a B seat in every House district.

Some of this is people. We keep contacts in the offices and with the IT staff behind them, so when a route breaks we know who to call.

We built the delivery system and the directory in 2018. In October 2018 organizers started publishing petitions to constituents, and the second edge went live.

2019 to 2020 It holds when the news breaks

Civic traffic comes in bursts, so the system has to scale with no warning. In 2020, the election year, we handled 175.6 million messages, in and out, across every channel. The officials lookup scaled out to carry it.

We write each conversation once, and it runs on SMS, iMessage, web chat, and the major messaging apps. The engine underneath is a fork of RapidPro that we run ourselves. Six channels carry letters today.

Every service ships with tracing. A single trace follows a message from the first text to the delivered letter.

The data platform behind Resistbot is serverless: AppSync, Lambda, Step Functions, and DynamoDB, all deployed with CDK. Lambda does much of the connecting. It backs API calls, runs workflow steps, and reacts to changes in the tables. We know DynamoDB well. Conditional writes keep a letter from going out twice, transactions keep petition counts exact, and Streams keep Amendment’s counts live.

It also has to be cheap. A team of four has run this since 2017, which only works when a quiet system costs little. The form-filling workers scale to zero between bursts, and we lean on spot capacity.

2021 to 2022 We rebuild the system while it carries messages

We rebuild a system without taking it down. In 2021 and 2022 Resistbot carried 44.3 million messages, and we moved the services under it onto one shared event system.

We kept shipping through it. In 2021 people could pay inside iMessage without leaving the conversation. The Resistbot iOS app shipped in 2022.

Every pull request stands up a complete environment of its own, runs live tests, and cleans up after itself. We deploy to production more than 50 times a week.

2023 to 2024 We finish the rebuild and start Amendment alongside Resistbot

We build the next product while the current one runs. In 2023 we folded four delivery services into one. Twitter suspended our API access in April 2023, and the other channels kept carrying letters.

2024 was an election year. Resistbot carried 28.8 million messages across 2023 and 2024. It has carried messages in every month since February 2017, through four federal elections.

In June 2024 we started building Amendment. On the graph, the dotted lines are the legislative data we collected for a year before anyone outside could use it.

2025 Amendment: every legislature’s bills in one graph

Amendment holds 281,986 bills across 57 jurisdictions and more than 7,500 politicians and candidates, from Congress down to city councils. We collect them from hundreds of public sources and keep them current in one graph. Organizations use its tools to take positions, endorse, and raise money.

Amendment launched in July 2025, a year after we started building it. On the graph, its edges run from government out to the businesses, lobbyists, and advocacy groups that track legislation.

Legislative data, and the tools to act on it. amendment.app

Now Next: connections that run both ways

So far, each connection carries messages in one direction. A letter goes to an office, a campaign goes to constituents, and legislation goes out to the people who track it. We’re building the connections that run both ways, inside Amendment.

The first is between voters and candidates, with endorsements, vote pledges, and fundraising. The others connect advocacy groups and lobbyists with each other and with government.

See what is live today, or come talk to us. We take on outside work, and we like swapping notes too.