Introducing Briefkist — your mail stays home

This project started a few weeks ago as a Mac mini in a cupboard and a working name that turned out to belong to someone else. Today it is Briefkist: a private, local-first archive for the paper mail of a household — open source, and soon available without owning a server.

The principle was fixed from the first commit. A letter is photographed on your phone, read and understood by AI on a single machine, and filed into an archive that answers questions like "the letter about the chimney inspection". No cloud, no telemetry, no third party in the data path.

What's new

The server is open source, AGPL-3.0, in the open on GitHub. Self-hosting is and will remain the full product — nothing is paywalled, nothing phones home.

And for households without a spare computer or the appetite to run one: we are opening hosted servers — single-tenant, in the EU, €15 a month. Everything one stores will be encrypted with a key derived from a passphrase only you hold — we will keep only ciphertext. We wrote down exactly what that does and doesn't protect against on the security page, including the words we refuse to use for it.

A privacy product that can't tell you its weakest moment doesn't know its own strength. Ours is the seconds a letter spends in RAM being read — and we put that in the marketing.

What's next

Hosted servers open; then honest comparisons, starting with "Briefkist vs Paperless-ngx" and "when NOT to use Briefkist" — because a tool for trust should be easy to rule out. If you want it today, self-hosting is ready — the full product, free, on your own hardware.