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.
Self-hosted document management
Thaw vs paperless-ngx
Technical households who ran paperless-ngx in Docker on a home server or a Mac mini, loved the consumption folder, and got tired of being the sysadmin.
paperless-ngx is excellent software and the right answer if you want to own the box. It OCRs, tags, and files with rules you write. What it does not do is understand the document: it will not pull the term end off a policy, link a vet record to the dog, or notice that 2021's return is missing. And it needs a computer that is always on. Thaw imports its export ZIP directly. We built Thaw after running paperless-ngx ourselves.
Side by side
| Thaw | paperless-ngx | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Hosted. Nothing to run at home. | You host it: Docker, a database, a Redis, backups, updates. The Mac mini stays on. |
| 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. | Consumption folder, email fetch from a mailbox, the web upload, mobile apps from the community. |
| Classification | Category and type taken from the page by Thaw, from a list of kinds that grows with what it sees. Never "uncategorized". | Correspondents, document types and tags you define, matched by rules or auto-matching on OCR text. Recent versions add an opt-in AI that can suggest them and chat about a document, with your own OpenAI key or a local Ollama. |
| Facts and dates | Every document is worked out once: category, type, title, the facts on it, the people & things it concerns, every date. Anything uncertain is flagged for a look. 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. | Created date and custom fields you fill in, with AI suggestions if you turn them on. No obligations. |
| People & things | Every document linked to who and what it concerns; a page per person, vehicle, property. | Correspondents (senders). No notion of the subject. |
| 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. | None. |
| Data ownership | Originals in a folder tree named the way Thaw names them, plus every fact as CSV and JSON, and a continuous mirror to your own Dropbox or Drive folder. Your keys are yours to destroy. | Everything on your disk, in the open. Total control. |
| Cost | Free tier, then from $8 a month. | Free software, plus the hardware, the electricity and your Saturday. |
Stay with paperless-ngx if
- You want every byte on hardware you own and no third party in the loop.
- You enjoy running it.
- Your workflow is entirely rule-based and it already works.
Move to Thaw if
- You want the machine off.
- You want the documents understood, beyond OCR and tags.
- You want someone in the household who is not you to be able to find things and be told what is due.
Moving over
Run the document exporter to a folder and zip it. Drop the ZIP on the import page. Thaw takes correspondents, document types, tags and created dates from the manifest and keeps them as hints. The originals are kept, and the searchable copy paperless made is used, so every scan is findable at once.
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.