A hosted document vault
Thaw vs Granite
People comparing hosted "life admin" document vaults. Granite (granite.co) is the closest product to Thaw in intent, and a fair comparison is the useful kind.
Granite is a hosted vault that reads what you drop in, links it to people, places and things, answers questions with citations, and ships a new feature every few days. It is good, and it is the product we would use if Thaw did not exist. The differences are in what happens after the read: Thaw turns every date into an obligation with a proposed solution that the next document resolves, keeps a checkup of what should be on file and is not, holds a family and a business in one account with separate walls, and keeps the master key in a hardware-backed key service rather than on the application tier. Details below are from Granite's public pages and changelog as of September 2026 and will have changed.
Side by side
| Thaw | Granite | |
|---|---|---|
| How paper gets in | Email-in address per family or business, scanner-to-email, browser upload, folder import, Evernote and paperless-ngx imports. Dropbox and Drive folder watch next. | Upload (PDF, images including HEIC, text), folder upload, email forwarding on the paid plan, Dropbox folder sync, an Evernote notebook import, and an iPhone app in beta. |
| Document types | Curated registry (about 120 types today) that grows from what it reads; a type it has never seen is proposed and filed, never "uncategorized". The UI shows plain words. | More than 110 types "and growing weekly"; you can teach it a new one. Types appear as slugs like medical/prescription. |
| People & things | Every document linked to the people, vehicles, properties and businesses it concerns. Each page shows the current facts, what is due, and what is missing for that person or thing. | Pages for people, places, things and pets, with AI-assisted curation, drag-to-merge and manual linking. Auto-collections around tax years, vehicles and policies. |
| Dates and deadlines | Every renewal, expiry, due date and notice period becomes an item with what happens if missed and what to do, from the document itself. Resolved by the next document. | Reminders on the dates it extracts, which you can mark as handled. No proposed solution, and the next document does not close the item. |
| What is missing | Knows what a person, vehicle, property, pet or business should have on file; lists what is missing, lapsed, expired or duplicated, worst first, with where to get it. | A checklist for moving house ("Move Mode", paid), built from the vault. No standing checkup of what a person, vehicle or property should have on file. |
| Family and business | A family and a business in one account, kept apart, with the CPA invited to one and not the other. Business expectation sets for licenses, filings and the year-end package. | Multiple vaults on the paid plan. Household types are the focus; LLC formation is among the types. |
| Sharing and emergency access | Members and roles per family or business. Expiring share links and emergency access with a heartbeat are scheduled for the public launch milestone, not available today. | Vault sharing with view or edit access, document links that expire, opt-in audited emergency access with an approval workflow and an inactivity heartbeat. |
| Where the keys live | Master key in AWS KMS, never on an app server; every unwrap logged. Per-account and per-document keys. | Per-upload keys wrapped by a per-user key derived from a master key that, per their security page, lives in the application servers' environment. |
| Search index | Identifiers redacted before indexing; chunk text encrypted at rest; only the derived vectors and full-text tokens are plaintext. | Search index and embeddings stored unencrypted, per their security page. |
| Sign-in | Passkeys first, email link fallback, no passwords. | Password with magic link, Apple ID, optional TOTP; 30-day sessions. |
| Audit log | Append-only and hash-chained at the database level, kept for the life of the account. | Append-only, 12-month retention, included in the export. |
| Your own assistant | Ask inside the app. An MCP server so your own assistant can ask your documents is planned. | MCP access for Claude and Cursor, a Raycast extension. |
| Price | Free for the first 500 documents sorted (25 read in full) with the full map and checkup; Personal from $79 a year, Family $119. | $99 a year, annual only, 100 GB, unlimited documents. Free: 25 documents for life, 1 GB, without Ask or email-in. |
Stay with Granite if
- You already use its sharing, emergency access or Dropbox sync and they work for you.
- You want a product that has been public longer.
- You want your own assistant talking to the vault today.
Move to Thaw if
- You want to be told what to do and by when, not just reminded that a date exists.
- You want to know what is missing, not just where things are.
- You run a business as well as a household.
- You care where the master key lives.
Point it at the pile and walk away.
Early access is open to a small group of households and owner-run businesses. Tell us a little about your paper and we will send an invitation.