🛡️ Privacy
A private alternative to "chat with your PDF" tools
Chat-with-PDF tools upload your files and write an answer that may not be in them. What to use instead when the documents are confidential and the answer has to be exactly what the document says.
"Chat with your PDF" tools are everywhere: upload a document, ask a question, get a fluent answer. For a public report that's handy. For a contract, a medical letter, an employee file or a client's accounts, two things about them are a problem.
📤 Problem 1: the files leave your computer
To answer, these tools send the document to a server, where it's stored, at least for a while, and read by a language model. Their privacy policy decides what happens next.
✍️ Problem 2: the answer is written, not found
A language model writes its answer. Usually it's right; sometimes it's confidently wrong, mixing up two clauses or inventing a date. Some tools add citations, but you still have to check each one, and the answer you'd paste into an email is the model's wording, not the document's.
⚖️ Side by side
| Chat-with-PDF tools | AskFolder | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your files go | uploaded to a server | stay on your computer |
| What you get | a written answer | the passage from your file |
| Can it invent something? | sometimes | no: it only shows your own text |
| How many files | usually one at a time | a whole folder |
| Scans and photos | varies | read on your computer |
🔎 How AskFolder works instead
- 🔒 Nothing is uploaded. The folder is read in your browser, on your computer. The page's security policy stops it from contacting any other site, askfolder.com has nothing that could receive a file, and you can watch the network tab in the browser's developer tools to check.
- 📄 Answers are passages, not prose. You ask in plain words ("what's the notice period", "when does the warranty end"), and each answer is the passage from your file, with the file name and page, best match first. If it's on the screen, it's in the document.
- 📁 A whole folder, not one file. Contracts, PDFs, Word files, notes, CSV exports, scans and photos are searched together.
- 🙋 It says when it isn't sure. When nothing matches well, it says the results are only close, instead of inventing an answer.
🤝 What you give up
A chat tool will summarise a 40-page report or draft a reply for you; AskFolder won't. It finds and shows; you read and decide. For confidential documents, and for anything where the exact wording matters, that's usually the trade you want.
🚀 Try it
Open askfolder.com/app and drop in a folder. The free version reads up to 50 files with no account; Pro reads folders of any size, keeps them ready between visits and reads every scanned page and photo.
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