What Archevi Actually Is (and Why We Built It)
What Archevi Actually Is (and Why We Built It)
Every family has a version of the same problem. The documents exist -- insurance policies, tax returns, medical records, property deeds, warranty cards. They're in a drawer, a folder on Google Drive, a shoebox, an email attachment from 2021. The information is there. It's just never findable at the moment you need it.
We didn't set out to build a document storage app. There are plenty of those. We set out to build something that could answer a question.
The Question That Started This
The trigger was specific. A family member needed to know whether a medical expense was covered under their health insurance plan. The policy document was somewhere -- probably in a "Documents" folder, possibly in an email, maybe still in the original envelope from the insurer. Finding it took 40 minutes. Reading the relevant clause took another 10. The answer was two sentences buried on page 14.
That's not a storage problem. Google Drive could store that PDF perfectly well. It's a retrieval problem -- knowing what's inside your documents without having to open and read each one.
What It Does
Archevi is a family knowledge base. You upload your documents -- PDFs, photos of receipts, scanned letters, whatever you have. From that point, you ask questions in plain language:
Try asking these questions about your own documents:
- "When does our home insurance expire?"
- "What's the deductible on our car policy?"
- "Which medical expenses can we claim this tax year?"
Archevi reads your documents, finds the relevant sections, and gives you an answer with the source highlighted. Not a keyword match -- a semantic understanding of what you're asking and what your documents contain.
The difference matters. If your municipal tax assessment is saved as "2025_city_notice.pdf" and you search for "property tax deadline," a traditional file search returns nothing. Archevi finds it because it understands what the document is about, not just what it's called.
How It Works (Without the Jargon)
When you upload a document, we extract the text and convert it into a mathematical representation that captures its meaning -- what AI researchers call an embedding. Your question gets converted the same way. Then we find the document sections whose meaning is closest to your question.
Those sections get passed to a language model that generates a clear answer, citing the specific part of your document it drew from. You can verify the source yourself -- we're not asking you to trust a black box.
The whole pipeline runs on infrastructure we control. We use Cohere for the embeddings, Groq for the fast inference, and PostgreSQL with pgvector for the search. No data gets stored on third-party servers beyond what's needed for the AI processing step -- and even that goes through a privacy layer first.
Archevi uses AI to help you find and understand your documents, not to make decisions for you. Think of it as a search engine for your family paperwork -- one that actually understands what a renewal date or a beneficiary name means.
The Privacy Decision
Every query is anonymised before it reaches any cloud AI. Names become surrogates, sensitive data like SINs is blocked entirely, and your real documents never leave our Canadian server. We wrote a detailed post about how this works -- including the honest tradeoffs of using US-based LLM providers with a Canadian anonymisation layer.
Compare that to uploading the same insurance policy to ChatGPT. The AI receives your real name, your real address, your real policy number — everything, verbatim. By default, OpenAI may use that data to train future models. Archevi’s anonymisation layer means the AI never sees your real information at all. It processes a query about “James Chen” instead of your actual family member, finds the right answer, and swaps the real name back before you see the result.
Why Canada Matters
All document storage runs on a server in Toronto. Not because Canadian hosting is inherently more secure -- the bits don't know what country they're in. It matters because of jurisdiction.
Under the US CLOUD Act, American authorities can compel US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world. If your family's documents sit on AWS or Google Cloud, they're subject to that authority regardless of whether you're Canadian. By hosting on Canadian infrastructure under PIPEDA, your data stays under Canadian privacy law.
This isn't a marketing point. It's an architectural decision that constrains where we can build and what services we can use. We chose the constraint deliberately.
What It Costs
The Starter plan is $6/month. For that, a couple gets semantic search across all their uploaded documents, the privacy layer, Canadian hosting, and the ability to ask questions instead of searching file names.
Start with just five documents -- your most important ones. A passport, a will, an insurance policy, a mortgage statement, and a tax return. You will see the value within ten minutes.
We estimate the practical value at $300-700/year in avoided costs -- missed insurance renewals, unclaimed tax deductions, duplicate services you forgot you were paying for -- plus 15-20 hours of time not spent searching for documents. The math isn't dramatic. It's just consistently positive.
What It Doesn't Do
Archevi is a retrieval system, not an advisory one. When it tells you your insurance expires on March 15th, it's reading your policy document -- not recommending whether you should renew. When it finds a medical expense that may be claimable, it's surfacing what the CRA's guidelines say -- not replacing your accountant.
The value is narrow but real: getting the right information from your own documents at the moment you need it. For most families, that's the part that wasn't working.
