Letters, bills and contracts pile up, and the one you need is never on top. With nexpaper you take a photo of a letter with your phone and it lands in the inbox. Sender, kind, date and amount are filled in already; you look it over and file it with one click. Everyone has a vault of their own, and there are shared ones for the household. The search finds every word in the text, years later too. nexpaper runs as a single container on your own server and, if you like, takes over the documents you already keep in Paperless-ngx.
What nexpaper is
nexpaper is made for the paperwork of a household or a small firm: the electricity instalment, the insurance, the tax assessment, the dentist's bill, the receipt for the new fridge. Everything new waits in the inbox first. The fields are filled in there already, from rules, from the text of the letter and, if you want it, with the help of an AI. Each field says where its proposal comes from. You check, change what does not fit, and file.
Then the document is in the archive, ordered by month and searchable in its whole text. On your server's disk it is a perfectly ordinary PDF file in a folder by vault, year and sender. It stays yours, even without nexpaper.
The way of a letter
On the phone nexpaper opens on the quick upload. The camera finds the edges of the sheet and straightens it; several pages become one document. Bills that come by mail you forward to nexpaper's mailbox, and the scanner in the hall drops its files into a folder that nexpaper watches.
In the inbox you check the filled-in fields. One click on “File it” puts the document in the archive. If the same letter is there already, scanned twice perhaps, nexpaper tells you before you keep it twice.
The search looks through titles, senders, notes and the whole recognised text, parts of words included. When the washing machine gives up in three years, you type “washing machine” and have the invoice in front of you, warranty date and all.
Instead of Paperless
Paperless-ngx is a mature tool with custom fields, storage paths, learning matching and workflows. If you need those, it is the right place. At home you often need only a little of that, and still run several services side by side.
nexpaper leaves out on purpose what hardly anyone misses at home, and in return stays a single container with text recognition built in. Moving over works from the interface: nexpaper reads your documents from Paperless-ngx together with the recognised text, senders, kinds and tags, and leaves Paperless-ngx untouched.
| nexpaper | Paperless-ngx | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is built | one container with SQLite | web server, a Redis-compatible service, a database of your choice, optionally Tika and Gotenberg for office files |
| A new document | waits in the inbox with proposals and where they come from | appears in the document list with an inbox tag, matched by rules, also learning ones |
| Who sees what | a vault per person, shared vaults, three levels of access | owner plus view and edit per object, for users and groups |
| What it does not have | custom fields, storage paths, workflows, office files | has all of those |
What nexpaper does
Everyone has a vault of their own that, at first, only they can see. Shared vaults such as “Home” are created by the operator, who gives read, edit or manage access.
A single document goes by link to someone without an account, such as your tax adviser. The link expires on its own, and you see when it was opened.
nexpaper reads ZUGFeRD, Factur-X and XRechnung from the invoice's data. Invoices that are pure XML get a readable page as well.
Choose a period and a vault, and nexpaper packs a ZIP with the PDFs and a list as CSV, as a link to pass on if you like.
Turn, delete and reorder pages, join documents or split them at blank separator sheets. Every change becomes a new version, the original stays.
For each document you can note when something is due, until when a contract runs, how long the warranty lasts and how long to keep it.
Yours
nexpaper runs on your own server, best kept in your own network and reached from on the way through a VPN. Text recognition happens there, not at a service on the internet. There is no AI out of the box. If you want one, you enter a model in your own network, with Ollama for instance, or a service that speaks the OpenAI interface.
Out of the box every account sets up a second factor, passkeys work too. To be honest, the documents lie on the disk as readable files, so that they stay yours without nexpaper. A personal vault means the app shows it to nobody else. Whoever runs the server can see the files there.
How to start
With Docker Compose nexpaper is there in a few minutes. The image is built for amd64 and arm64, and there is a ready template for Unraid.
The first account is the operator's. Then you create shared vaults and invite the others.
Take a photo of the first letter, enter the mailbox or take over everything from Paperless-ngx. Whatever arrives waits in the inbox.
Free and open source
nexpaper is free software under the AGPL-3.0. It costs nothing, and the only things that go out are what you set up yourself, plus the question about a new version when somebody opens the page “About nexpaper”.