Press materials & press release.

A DMS for people, not IT departments: PaperPeace enters public beta

The app puts document management into families’ hands for the first time — sorted automatically, private on your own device, with no server and no forced subscription.

Übach-Palenberg, Germany, July 4, 2026 — Every household drowns in paper: medical bills, warranty receipts, contracts with cancellation deadlines, the kids’ school forms. Today’s tools fail at both ends — photo and scanner apps create no order, while professional document management systems (DMS) demand servers, maintenance and IT know-how. PaperPeace now enters public beta to close exactly that gap: a full document archive as simple as a consumer app and as private as your own filing cabinet.

You scan or import a document, and PaperPeace reads the text on the device via OCR and files everything automatically — type, date, sender, recipient and tags. Recognition learns from your corrections, full-text search reaches into the scanned word, and reminders alert you before deadlines such as an expiring warranty or a cancellation window. PaperPeace is a single universal app for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

What matters just as much is what PaperPeace does not do: there is no server, no account and no third-party cloud. OCR and recognition run entirely on the device; documents are never sent to the vendor. Users choose where their data lives — locally, in iCloud Drive or in their own cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive). Everything stays in open formats: documents as ordinary PDFs, metadata as readable Markdown files. No vendor lock-in.

Three key messages

• An open niche: DMS were built for companies. PaperPeace makes them usable for families for the first time — simple, with no administration and no server.
• Privacy by default: Sensitive health, child and financial documents stay on the device. On-device recognition instead of a vendor cloud, GDPR-compliant, developed in Germany.
• No lock-in, no forced subscription: Data as ordinary PDFs plus readable Markdown, stored locally or in your own cloud — the sovereignty of your own server, without the server.

Availability & pricing

PaperPeace is available now as a public beta via Apple’s TestFlight; sign-up runs through paperpeace.app. PaperPeace is free to use; those who want more can later choose an optional Pro subscription or a one-time Lifetime purchase. There is no forced subscription, no advertising and no hidden costs.

“Every family has the same problem a company does — they lose track of their documents. But nobody wants to run a server for it or upload their health records to someone else’s cloud. PaperPeace is built for exactly those people.”

— Timo Beyel, founder & developer of PaperPeace

About PaperPeace

PaperPeace is a document app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that helps individuals and families tame their paperwork — with no server, no forced subscription and no third-party cloud. Documents are recognised, sorted and made searchable directly on the device; the on-device recognition learns from corrections, and all data stays in user-controlled storage. PaperPeace is GDPR-compliant and developed in Germany.

PaperPeace grew out of a very personal problem. Timo Beyel has designed and built consumer applications for more than 20 years — yet at home, the paper pile kept winning for years. Private medical bills in particular were a constant theme: submit them, track their status with the health insurer, and keep wondering, “hang on — has anyone actually paid this yet?” The result was quarterly “clean-up weekends” — hours of sifting, sorting and shredding, always ending in the same resolution: “next time we’ll stay on top of it.” Meanwhile the ring binders filled shelf after shelf.

But every obvious solution failed on some detail. A self-hosted system like paperless-ngx was out — administering a server in his spare time too was not what he wanted. Cloud-based DMS were out as well: during his years of self-employment he had relied on a commercial system that locked all data into a proprietary database and ran on Windows only. When work moved him to the Mac, getting the data back out became a slog — and all the metadata was lost. He never wanted that vendor lock-in again: the files should always sit in the file system as plain files, the metadata simple enough to convert at any time.

Then there was trust. Hand his most private records to yet another unfamiliar cloud provider? The family already trusted Apple — and already paid for iCloud+. So why add monthly fees for a second cloud service? Manual tagging, meanwhile, quickly wore out his wife’s patience. Early experiments with AI were astonishingly good — but the same question came up at once: share every doctor’s letter, tax assessment and the will with an external AI? No. The solution had to do its recognition on the device, without sending documents to someone else’s AI.

So he built one for himself, in his spare time. When friends asked whether they could have it too, the idea of offering PaperPeace publicly was born. The family still uses the app every day — and it is improved and extended constantly as a result. The guiding principle has stayed the same: documents are recognised and sorted right on the device, and stored in open formats (ordinary PDFs plus readable Markdown) in a place you choose yourself — locally, in iCloud Drive or your own cloud. No unfamiliar DMS provider, no forced subscription, no lock-in. A high “Woman Acceptance Factor” included.