From Evernote to paperless-ngx to building my own

I have been filing my own paper since Evernote was the answer to everything. Scannable on the counter, a notebook per year, tags I stopped maintaining somewhere around 2016. It worked, in the sense that the documents existed and search usually found them. It also cost more every year and drifted toward being a notes app with a filing cabinet bolted on.

So I did what a lot of technical people did and moved to paperless-ngx. Docker on a Mac mini in the closet, a consumption folder the scanner dropped into, correspondents and document types I set up over a weekend, OCR on everything. It is excellent software. The consumption folder is the best ingestion idea in the category, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to own the box.

Two things wore on me. The first was that I was the sysadmin. Updates, backups, the Mac mini that needed restarting after a power blip, the Saturday afternoon when the database volume filled up. The second was subtler: paperless knew where every document was and nothing about what any of them meant. It could not tell me the Civic’s registration had lapsed. It did not know that the lease required sixty days’ notice. It filed the 2021 tax return I never scanned exactly as well as the ones I did, which is to say the gap was invisible.

The step nobody removed

Every tool asked me to carry the document to it. Evernote made me drag. Paperless made me keep a computer on to watch a folder. The hosted vaults that came later make you upload or forward. The work got smaller each time and it never reached zero, and paper that requires any work at all eventually goes into a pile instead.

I wanted a tool that stood at the doors paper comes through, read each thing once, and told me what it meant and when.

What I built instead

Thaw gives each family and business an email-in address the scanner can send to directly. Every document is read on arrival: category, type, title, facts, who it concerns, what dates it carries. The home screen is the household, not a folder tree. The checkup tells me what a household like mine usually has on file and I do not. Up next turns every date into a plan with the phone number on the page.

The first thing I did with it was import my own paperless-ngx export through the same screen anyone else would use. The checkup told me two true things I did not know within the hour. The Mac mini is off.

If you are where I was with Evernote or paperless, the import paths exist because I needed them. If you are happy where you are, the comparison pages say so honestly.