Set it up once.
Connect the places your documents already land. From then on they arrive filed and understood, every date with what to do.
Everything in Family for your first 14 days, then free forever for your first 100 documents. No card to enter.
A workspace and database tool
Thaw vs Notion
People who built a "Home admin" database in Notion with properties for expiry dates and an uploaded PDF per row.
A Notion database is a fine place to record what you have, and every row has to be typed by a person. Thaw fills the rows from the documents. If you love the Notion setup, keep it for the planning and let Thaw be where the documents live.
Side by side
| Thaw | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| How documents get in | Connected once to email, a scanner, a Google Drive or Dropbox folder, Gmail, and your phone; documents arrive on their own from then on. Forward or drop in anything yourself, and bring the pile you have through an Evernote, paperless-ngx or folder import. | Upload to a page or a database property, by hand. |
| Structure | Category, type and facts taken from the page; properties appear because the document has them. | Whatever properties you design, filled in by you. |
| Dates | 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. | Date properties and reminders, entered manually. |
| Flexibility | A fixed shape: twelve categories, a list of kinds, people & things. | Unlimited. Build anything. |
| Security | A key per document, locked by a key per account, locked by a master key in a separate key service. Identifying numbers sealed, and blanked from the search index. A log that only grows. Deleting destroys the key. | Workspace-level encryption; content indexed for search and AI features. |
Stay with Notion if
- You want a custom system and enjoy maintaining it.
- Documents are a small part of a larger personal wiki.
Move to Thaw if
- You stopped updating the database months ago.
- You want the checkup to tell you what the database would have, if you had kept it up.
Emaila rule you set once3 this week
Google Drivethe Family folder, watched2 this week
Scannersends straight to Thaw1 this week
Phonethe camera, for what only exists on paper
This week: 6 arrived, 6 filed, none touched by hand.