Born from real paper chaos.

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.