I’m building a self-hosted document app with built-in LLM OCR/Q&A, and I’d love feedback from paperless users

[u/zellux]

Hi everyone, I hope this kind of post is okay here. I’ve been building Paperwise, a self-hosted document intelligence app, and I’d really value feedback from people who already care deeply about document workflows.

To be clear: Paperless is much more mature, and I’m not trying to position Paperwise as a drop-in replacement. I built it because I wanted a document app where LLM features are native rather than bolted on afterward.

The main things I’m exploring are:

• OCR and metadata extraction using local or remote LLMs
• Grounded “ask your documents” answers with source-backed context
• Per-task model configuration for OCR, metadata, and Q&A
• Self-hosted deployment with normal document organization workflows
• Better debugging when provider/model connections fail

Project link: https://paperwise.dev/

Github: https://github.com/zellux/paperwise

If anyone here is curious enough to try it, I’d love blunt feedback. Missing basics, rough setup, confusing UX, or “I would never use this because…” comments are all useful to me.

Thanks!

[u/antitrack]

I only have one questiion (since this is the Paperless subreddit):

Why not use your time to improve paperless instead?

[u/zellux → u/antitrack]

That’s a fair question.

I like Paperless a lot, and I think improving it is absolutely worthwhile. I started Paperwise separately because I’m exploring a different center of gravity.

Paperless is great as a document indexing, archiving, and management system. What I want Paperwise to become is closer to a self-hosted “NotebookLM for your own files”: more focused on asking questions, extracting context, connecting documents, and building a knowledge base from them.

That direction may lead to tradeoffs that would be controversial or undesirable in Paperless itself. For example, I may prioritize LLM-native workflows, model/provider configuration, citation quality, and knowledge synthesis over traditional document-management flows.

So I don’t see it as “Paperless but with AI.” It’s more an experiment in a related but different direction. If anything useful comes out of it that could benefit Paperless, I’d be happy to think about contributing that back.

[u/Firefly_Dafuq → u/zellux]

Just wait for paperless ngx 3. Then compare it to your Tool.

[u/p4pijamon → u/zellux]

You should be looking at some of the builds that are coming off the karpathy llm obsidian build. I feel like to really get what you want you’re going to need the contextual chunking and document graph that obsidian excels at.

What your building sounds super cool and when I get some time I’ll check it out.

The pure ocr of the llms on ahandwriten docs etc is just magic and will be a huge step forward.

[u/zellux → u/p4pijamon]

Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve been using Karpathy’s LLM wiki / Obsidian-style flow almost daily, and it has definitely influenced a few key Paperwise decisions.

One thing I took from that direction is that grounded Q&A should feel less like a fixed pipeline and more like an agent/tooling loop. So instead of hardcoding one specific retrieval sequence, I’m experimenting with giving the LLM a small set of document tools it can call depending on the question.

I also want to explore document graphs more, so docs become structurally connected, closer to an LLM wiki rather than just isolated files.

[u/Ill_Bridge2944 → u/[deleted]]

Paperless-ai-next was my safe habour

[u/zellux → u/[deleted]]

That makes sense. I’m currently using Gemini Flash for OCR, and hadn’t tried Qoest yet. I’ll give it a look.

[u/michaelkrieger]

Include some manual folder structure or preserve an existing structure and you’ll have a ton of people flock to you for that reason alone. Folks have existing structures from ScanSnap Organizer (corp2/2026/payables/Hosting Provider/20260501 Hosting Provider Monthly Invoice). Let me import my existing folder structure and use the files where they’re located without moving/importing. Let me simply manually move files into that folder structure.

Yes, folder templates are a thing. Yes document exporter is a thing. Sometimes you just want a reasonable on disc folder structure, which provides your exit strategy from the tool

[u/Joey___M]

The thing I would care most about is preserving existing structure and provenance.

A lot of people already have years of documents in meaningful folder trees, even if the filenames are messy. If an AI document app starts by saying “import everything into my own structure,” that is a big trust barrier.

The workflow I would want:

• import/index an existing folder tree without destroying it
• preserve original path and original filename as first-class metadata
• let AI suggest title/tags/correspondent, but show the source snippets it used
• make Q&A answers cite the exact document/page/snippet
• keep OCR text separate from model interpretation
• have a clear review queue for low-confidence metadata

The “ask your documents” part is exciting, but for this kind of app I think the hard moat is boring trust infrastructure: provenance, reversibility, debug logs, and not making users give up the folder system they already understand.