SA
← All work
SaaS Live

Papertrail

Role Founder & Engineer
Timeline March 2026 — Ongoing
Year 2026
Live usepapertrail.app
10+
active users
$0
marketing spend
Mar 2026
founded
Overview

I built PaperTrail after a document expiry caught me off guard. The kind of thing that only happens once before you decide someone should fix it. There were reminder apps and scanner apps — but nothing that actually owned the full problem: track the document, know when it expires, walk you through renewing it, and get out of your way. So I built it.

PaperTrail is a document renewal tracker for people who have better things to do. Scan your passport, insurance, licence, or visa once — PaperTrail extracts the expiry date, monitors the status, and sends you reminders via push, email, or calendar before anything lapses. It also handles the messy renewal process: AI-generated step-by-step checklists tailored to your document type and country, interim document tracking, and step deadline reminders. Renewing a Nigerian driver's licence is not the same as renewing a UK passport — PaperTrail knows the difference.

Premium users get The Drop — a personal forwarding address at drop.usepapertrail.app. Forward any document-related email to it and PaperTrail reads it, extracts whatever's relevant, and shows you a confirmation prompt. No typing, no manual entry. It should feel like magic. There's also Handoff — a QR code flow that lets you scan a physical document using your phone while you're logged in on a desktop. Secure document sharing lets you generate a time-limited link to any document — no account needed on the recipient's end.

Live at usepapertrail.app at $3.99/month. Ten active users and counting, with zero marketing spend.

What I built
→ Built the full product — Next.js 15, Supabase, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript
→ OCR scanning with AI extraction — point your camera at any document to capture expiry date, type, and issuer
→ Multi-file upload per document with version history — as the document changes over time
→ PDF viewer with renderer plugin pattern — preview uploaded documents inline without leaving the app
→ The Drop — email document ingestion for Premium users via a personal forwarding address at drop.usepapertrail.app; built the inbound email webhook, Resend attachment parsing, .eml thread handling, SSRF guard, and retry-with-backoff for Resend's webhook-before-API-ready behaviour
→ Handoff — QR code flow for scanning a physical document on mobile while logged in on desktop, with Redis-backed session linking and QR expiry management
→ Secure sharing — time-limited share links with watermarking and revoke controls; no recipient account required
→ Push notification system via OneSignal — browser opt-in, notification history, and expiry reminder delivery
→ Multi-step renewal tracking — AI-suggested checklists by document type and country, interim document tracking with linked parent-child rows, and step deadline reminders
→ LemonSqueezy subscription management — checkout, webhook handling, usage limits, and subscription renewal date in settings
→ Full marketing site — use-case hub and spoke pages, SEO metadata, JSON-LD schemas, XML sitemap, canonical tags, and Vercel Web Analytics
→ Sentry release tracking, CI version-bump enforcement, and Vercel deployment pipeline
Dashboard
Papertrail dashboard — document summary and recent activity feed
Documents
Papertrail documents list — status dots, tabs for Valid, Expiring Soon, Expired, Archived
Reminders
Papertrail reminders — post-expiry follow-up email cadence
Sharing
Papertrail sharing — active and expired links with watermark and revoke controls
The Drop
The Drop — email forwarding feature that auto-detects documents from forwarded emails
Add document
Add document flow — upload photo or PDF, add manually, or import from CSV
Papertrail — product overview
Papertrail — feature highlight
Papertrail — document tracking
Tech stack
Next.js TypeScript Supabase Tailwind CSS Resend OneSignal LemonSqueezy Sentry Vercel
Next project Valentine →