Set it up once.
Connect the places your documents already land. From then on they arrive filed and understood, every date with what to do.
Everything in Family for your first 14 days, then free forever for your first 100 documents. No card to enter.
A notes app
Thaw vs Evernote
People who used Evernote as a filing cabinet for years, often with Scannable, and watched the price climb while the product drifted toward notes and tasks.
Evernote is a good notes app that many people bent into a document store. It never watched where documents arrive, and it does not know what a W-2 is or that a registration lapsed. Thaw imports an .enex export directly, keeping notebooks and tags as hints.
Side by side
| Thaw | Evernote | |
|---|---|---|
| How documents get in | Connected once to email, a scanner, a Google Drive or Dropbox folder, Gmail, and your phone; documents arrive on their own from then on. Forward or drop in anything yourself, and bring the pile you have through an Evernote, paperless-ngx or folder import. | You clip, scan (Scannable) or forward to a personal Evernote address, then file into notebooks yourself. |
| What it understands | Every document is worked out once: category, type, title, the facts on it, the people & things it concerns, every date. Anything uncertain is flagged for a look. | OCR makes scans searchable; the AI Assistant and semantic search on paid plans answer questions over your notes. Notes are notes; there is no notion of a policy, a lease or a tax year. |
| Dates and deadlines | Every renewal, expiry, due date and notice period becomes an item with what happens if missed and what to do, from the document itself. Resolved by the next document. | Reminders and tasks you create by hand. |
| What is missing | Knows what a person, vehicle, property, pet or business should have on file; lists what is missing, lapsed, expired or duplicated, worst first, with where to get it. | None. |
| Notes and clips | A quick note is a document. Web clipping is not a goal. | Excellent notes, web clipper, tasks, calendar. This is what it is for. |
| Security | A key per document, locked by a key per account, locked by a master key in a separate key service. Identifying numbers sealed, and blanked from the search index. A log that only grows. Deleting destroys the key. | Encryption in transit and at rest; content is indexed for search. No per-user key model published. |
| Getting out | Originals in a folder tree named the way Thaw names them, plus every fact as CSV and JSON, and a continuous mirror to your own Dropbox or Drive folder. | .enex export of notes with attachments embedded. |
| Price | Free for the first 100 documents sorted; paid plans from $8 a month or $79 a year. | Free is 50 notes and one notebook. Starter $99 a year (1,000 notes, 5 GB); Advanced $249.99 a year, which is where document scanning and advanced search live. Plans have been renamed and repriced several times. |
Stay with Evernote if
- You mostly write and clip, and documents are a minority of what you keep.
- You rely on Evernote tasks, calendar or web clipper every day.
Move to Thaw if
- Most of your notebooks are scans and PDFs you never want to file again.
- You want to see what you have and what is missing, beyond a search box.
- You are tired of paying for a notes app to be a filing cabinet.
Moving over
Export each notebook as .enex (or all notes at once). Import the file into your family or business in Thaw. Notes with attachments become documents; notes without attachments become note documents. Notebook names and tags ride along as hints for Thaw.
Emaila rule you set once3 this week
Google Drivethe Family folder, watched2 this week
Scannersends straight to Thaw1 this week
Phonethe camera, for what only exists on paper
This week: 6 arrived, 6 filed, none touched by hand.