paperjam
Your agent asksWhen does John’s passport expire?
- Holder
- John Doe
- Number
- TS1234567 check digit
- Issued by
- Ministry of Testing
- Expires
- 01 Sep 2032
1. Doe, John. 2. Travel documents. 3. Republic of Testing.
Your agent gets a library card.
paperjam files your passports, contracts and policies on your own server, reads every field, and opens the drawer to any MCP client. Ask when the residence permit runs out; get a date and the card it came from.
Open source, AGPL-3.0. Runs in Docker. No telemetry.
Your agent asksHow much notice does the lease need?
- Parties
- John Doe, Testville Housing
- Rent
- 1,200.00 a month
- Notice
- 3 months, in writing
- Runs until
- 31 Mar 2027
1. Doe, John. 2. Housing. 3. Testville Housing.
Your agent asksWhere do I pay the car insurance?
- Insurer
- Testing Mutual
- Covers
- Car, green card abroad
- Pay to
- TS56 TEST 0000 1234 5678
- Valid until
- 14 Feb 2027 IBAN checksum
1. Doe, John. 2. Vehicles. 3. Testing Mutual.
Synthetic cards. The Republic of Testing does not exist; its paperwork does.
Every value on screen comes from a running paperjam holding the same synthetic scans.
For the agent
Any MCP client can search the drawer, read a card, look at the scan, file a new document and fix a field. The one thing it can’t do is throw something away for good.
| search_documents | Find by any word, person, type or field. |
|---|---|
| get_document | Read a card: its fields, its facts, its page text. |
| get_page_image | Look at the scan itself when OCR may have misread a digit. |
| upload_document | File a new scan straight from the conversation. |
| update_document | Correct a field, a person, a tag. |
| reprocess_document | Read it again after you change the settings. |
| trash_document | Move to trash, and back with restore. Purging stays with a person. |
Claude.ai connects with OAuth: you sign in and approve it on your own paperjam. Claude Code and other clients take a URL and a token. Connecting an agent
What happens to a scan
- Kept as it came. The original is stored byte for byte and never modified.
- Read on your machine. PDF text, Tesseract OCR in twelve languages, and the machine-readable zone of passports and ID cards.
- Typed. With an LLM key, it is sorted into one of 21 document types and that type’s fields are filled: holder, number, dates, amounts.
- Checked. MRZ check digits, IBANs and national ID numbers from ten countries are verified. A failed check flags the card instead of quietly storing a wrong number.
- Shelved. Searchable by every word and every field, from the web app or by your agent.
All of it is one small binary: Rust, SQLite and an embedded search index. No Redis, no Postgres, no extra containers. Without an LLM key, everything but step 3 still runs.
What leaves the building
- Without an LLM key, nothing. No telemetry, no update check, no cloud calls.
- With a key, only what you signed out. Document text and page images go to the provider you chose. Mark a document
Never send to the cloud
and it stays home. - Originals stay originals. One-command backup, and a zip export in an open layout.
- Agents can’t purge. Trash and restore, yes. Deleting for good takes a signed-in person.
Made for a household or a few people sharing one archive: everyone sees everything, there are no per-user permissions and no workflow rules. It is a drawer, not an office.
Get the card.
Run it on a home server, a NAS, a VPS or your own computer. You need Docker with the Compose plugin.
The installer asks four things: where to put it, how you’ll reach it, the languages of your documents, and an optional LLM key. Then it prints the address and a one-time setup code.
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ilodezis/paperjam/main/install.sh)"
Rather do it by hand
mkdir paperjam && cd paperjam
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ilodezis/paperjam/main/compose.example.yml -o compose.yml
docker compose up -d
docker compose logs paperjam
The last log line holds the setup code. There are no default passwords. Full install guide