About

Built to be
run by you.

AskDocs exists because the obvious fix for a messy document archive — upload it all to a chat assistant — is the one thing a great many teams are not allowed to do.

01 — Why

People remember the content, not the location.

Documents scatter. They end up in Drive and Dropbox and SharePoint and Slack threads and email attachments and a shared drive nobody has mapped since 2021 and a folder called Documents on somebody's laptop. You remember there was a decision about the Q4 pricing tier. You do not remember which of those places it is in.

Keyword search does not cross those boundaries, and it does not help when you remember the idea but not the phrasing. So the real retrieval method becomes asking three colleagues and hoping one of them remembers better than you do.

AskDocs collapses that to a single question — and then shows you the document, so you can check the answer instead of trusting it.

That is the entire product. It does one narrow thing deliberately: here is a pile of documents; let me ask questions across them and get cited answers, on my own hardware.

02 — Where we stand

No investors. No telemetry. No callbacks.

AskDocs runs on your hardware and reports to nobody — including us. There is no usage ping, no licence check, no analytics beacon and no account on our side that has to exist for your instance to work.

We are not asking you to take that on trust. It is MIT-licensed source code: the way to confirm it is to read it, or to run the thing air-gapped and watch it not reach for the network.

There is no paid tier, no per-seat price, and no enterprise edition held back behind a call with sales. The self-hosted stack in the repository is the product, in full.

03 — How it is built

Built to be understood.

A project you are expected to operate yourself has to be legible. That shapes what gets written down.

Every setting documented

Each environment variable is written up — what it does, what it defaults to, and what breaks if you change it.

Decisions on record

Architecture decisions are recorded with their reasoning, so "why is it like this" has an answer that outlives the author.

A log of the odd bits

A running note of things that look wrong but are intentional — the cheapest way to stop someone helpfully breaking them.

An honest self-assessment

Including what is untested and unmeasured. It is uncomfortable reading, and it stays in the repository.

04 — Who

A small team, and contributors.

AskDocs is built by a small team and released under the MIT licence as AskDocs Contributors. It is early — version 0.1 — and the roadmap is short and public rather than long and aspirational.

If you want to help, the most useful contributions right now are the unglamorous ones: running it on hardware we have not tried, breaking the installer, and telling us exactly how.

Get in touch, or open an issue in the repository.

Read the code.

Every claim on this page is checkable in the repository. That is the whole idea.

View on GitHub ↗ Run it yourself →