The Papers

Maker

📌

The story of this app is similar to many of yours: I've started building this app for myself. I've got many paper documents at home: bills, prescriptions, all kinds of certificates, etc. Scanning and keeping them in the filesystem as files and folders were not letting me group and sort the scans the way I like: it's either by type or person then by year or year and then by type or project. And I wanted to have both. And tags in macOS didn't help much either. So I wrote a simple app, keeping some of the papers' metadata in the Firestore, and kept adding features like linking to contacts, OCR to retrieve text for better search, stacks and multiple currencies because I needed all of these myself. One day, one of my friends told me he want to use something like this too. And I've upgraded the app to be multiuser, added encryption, so even I cannot see the data of my friends, compiled iOS and Android and that lets me have even notifications for the due dates and anniversaries. And I was able to make it publicly available. The two aspects I'm thinking about and working on are automatically filling the metadata from the recognized text and sharing the papers with other users. I'm curious, how do you sort and manage your papers at home? Keeping them in cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox or just images in your device's photo gallery? Maybe I can use some of your ideas to improve the UX of my app? ;-))

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2yr ago

Rares Vasilescu

Great idea, and... I was thinking.. would you be open to integrated with other apps? I just launched here theContracts.net (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) which came about in a very similar way with your story: first for personal use and now we have many others using it. I always didn't want to include in my app the feature to actually scan and store documents as there are many other ways to do this much better. Instead I'm focusing on organizing information about "contracts" (reminders, terms, relationships) including some natural language processing. I'd love to see how we can link what you have together with mine. Interested?

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2yr ago

Andrey Lechev

The Papers

Maker

@raresva Thanks. I should think about integrating. It's something that I have no idea about yet but seems interesting! Of course, I had some ideas to communicate with the file storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox, so the users that already have their scans there can use them and have the ability to export all the papers there. The Contracts seems more like a business-oriented solution and have to try it first before I can tell you something about integration. Thanks for the service, will try it right now

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2yr ago

Rares Vasilescu

@leechylabs Yep, one feature we'll add is the ability to connect to GDrive/Dropbox/OneDrive so we can link those files to contracts/partners. You have the "contacts" information in The Papers which is quite similar to our "partners" item. Indeed theContracts is more of a business-level application. There are some home and personal use cases also but we're not targeting that as much.

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2yr ago

Aliaksei Saskevich

Sequoia: Men's Sexual Wellness

Hey, congratulations on the launch! It’s really a big trouble to manage documents at home - bills, medical documents, etc. Does it support text recognition? I found for me that sometimes it is really important to find paper by some short text or keyword. Also it is nice to have to scan documents by photo and convert to PDF - as it does native iOS Notes.app Keep doing!

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2yr ago

Andrey Lechev

The Papers

Maker

@asaskevich thanks for the congrats! Yes, there is text recognition already. It's not working on all papers automatically by default yet, but really soon it will. The extracted text is searchable, of course. What is more essential for me than searching is to use it to fill in all the metadata for the user: title, reference, contacts, amounts, etc. That's what I'm concentrating on right now.

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2yr ago

Denis Galka

Sequoia: Men's Sexual Wellness

@asaskevich Good question! +1 I'm always interested in text recognition

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2yr ago

The Papers

Manager for all your boring papers and documents at home