Paperless-home

Paperless-home hosts your personal Paperless, a digital document archive that automatically organizes all your documents based on their content.

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Hey everyone, I am the founder of Paperless-home, a hosting service for the amazing Paperless (-ngx) document management system.

Inspiration

After having used paperless-ngx myself for quite a while, I found it so incredibly useful that I wanted everyone to know about it and be able to use it. Unfortunately, it needs to be installed on a server which has to be set up and maintained correctly, and I figured that not everyone knows how to do that or wants to deal with it. This is why I made Paperless-home!

What it does

Everybody has to keep and manage important documents. But keeping them both well organized and easily available at any time is quite a challenge. Anyone who has spent time digging through piles of paper or searching in some chaotic digital folder with hundreds of files knows the hassle. With your own Paperless, you can have your stuff both organized and available without compromise. Use it as your digital archive and organize everything into owners, correspondents, document types, custom tags etc.. And whenever you need to access a document, just filter or do a full-text-search using your browser or the mobile app.

How I built it

I didn't make Paperless-home with the intention to make it public from the beginning. Initially, it was simply for myself. I love coding and I just wanted to start a new project. So that is what I did. And as time passed, it went way past the state of a minimum viable product and became solid and reliable. Suddenly, it was working as a cloud service hosting isolated and well-secured Paperless instances.

Challenges I ran into

Making the platform work for myself was easy, but making it work for a potentially large amount of users is challenging. It took quite a lot of iterations to get things right. The biggest challenge was probably to design and develop a gateway for the requests to be routed to the correct target Paperless instances. Those would boot up when a requests comes in and shut down when it is not needed - which enables me to offer even the paid plans for very affordable prices.

What's next for Paperless-home

Lots of things can still be improved and a few features can be added. That means a lot of coding fun ahead! Some of these are: faster Paperless boots, full exports with database (to move to another hosting of self-host), bring-your-own-domain and additional backup feature.

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