After Skiff: What Privacy-First Document Users Still Cannot Find
What happened to Skiff
In February 2024, Notion acquired Skiff, a privacy-first productivity suite with encrypted email, documents, drive, and calendar. The same day, Skiff announced it would shut down within six months. By August 2024, every Skiff product was gone. By February 2025, even email forwarding from @skiff.com addresses stopped working.
Roughly two million users lost their privacy-first workspace overnight. The founders joined Notion. The code went dark. The promise of sustainable, encrypted productivity tools disappeared into an acqui-hire.
Notion acquires Skiff. Shutdown announced the same day.
Every Skiff product goes dark. Two million users displaced.
Email forwarding from @skiff.com addresses stops working.
Archevi launches privacy-first document intelligence for Canadian families.
Where Skiff users went
Most migrated to Proton. It made sense: Proton offers encrypted email, drive, and calendar, the closest replacement for what Skiff provided. Proton is community-funded rather than VC-backed, and has over 100 million users. It is the safest bet for email.
But Proton does not do one thing Skiff users valued: document intelligence.
Proton's zero-access encryption means their servers cannot read your files. That is a deliberate feature. But it also means Proton will never offer AI-powered search over your documents. They cannot build what they cannot see.
The gap nobody filled
Skiff users wanted two things at once: privacy-first document handling and the ability to actually find information in those documents. After the shutdown, the privacy community got email replacements (Proton, Tuta, Mailfence) and storage replacements (Proton Drive, Cryptee). But nobody replaced the intelligence layer.
- Proton Drive stores files securely but cannot search their contents
- Cryptee encrypts documents but offers no AI search or Q&A
- Standard Notes, part of Proton since April 2024, handles text notes but not PDFs, policies, or scanned documents
- Notion (the acquirer) is not end-to-end encrypted and stores data on US servers
The document intelligence gap has been open for over a year.
What Archevi does differently
Archevi is built for a specific use case: families who need to find information inside their important documents, such as insurance policies, wills, tax returns, medical records, and property deeds. Upload your documents, ask questions in plain English, and get answers with the exact page cited.
Here is how it addresses the concerns that Skiff users care about most:
Before any AI sees your documents, Archevi strips personal information and replaces it with realistic surrogates. The AI never sees your real names, account numbers, or identifying details. This is called boundary anonymization, and it happens automatically on every query.
All data is stored on DigitalOcean servers in Toronto, governed by Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA). Not US servers subject to the CLOUD Act. Not Swiss servers (though those are excellent for email). Canadian jurisdiction for Canadian families.
Each family gets their own isolated database. Your documents are not sitting next to another family's documents in a shared table. The isolation is architectural, baked into how the system is built.
This matters more than most people realize. Skiff raised $14.2 million in venture capital. When the acqui-hire came, users had no leverage. Archevi is funded by subscriptions. There is no investor pressure to exit, no board pushing for an acquisition, and no scenario where your data gets absorbed into a platform you did not choose.
What Archevi is not
Archevi is not a Skiff replacement. It does not offer encrypted email, calendar, or general-purpose cloud storage. If you need those, Proton is excellent.
Archevi does one thing: it makes your family's important documents searchable and understandable while keeping them private. If you left Skiff because you believed your documents deserved better than a platform that could be sold out from under you, Archevi was built for exactly that belief.
Try it
Sign up free. Upload your first document in under a minute. Every family member gets full AI search on every plan. No credit card required.
Founder of Archevi. Web guy, parent of 3, and the person who spent two hours looking for a document. Based in Ontario, Canada.
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