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Pixily turns stacks of paper into search-friendly scans

Got loads of bills and other docs you want to scan? Check out Pixily, a Netflix-like service for your paper.

Josh Lowensohn Former Senior Writer
Josh Lowensohn joined CNET in 2006 and now covers Apple. Before that, Josh wrote about everything from new Web start-ups, to remote-controlled robots that watch your house. Prior to joining CNET, Josh covered breaking video game news, as well as reviewing game software. His current console favorite is the Xbox 360.
Josh Lowensohn
2 min read

Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services is that Pixily is focused less on receipts and finances, and more on day-to-day papers like insurance claims, long cell phone bills (with call lists on them) and little things like birthday cards.

Everything that's scanned goes through optical character recognition (OCR), so you can search for it in the built-in search tool. It also lets you tag, and make notations to documents for the sake of sorting. If you've got digital documents, you can upload them into the mix as well.

Like Netflix, Pixily works through the mail with similar pre-paid envelopes that you can stuff with as much paper as allows. Each paid plan has a higher number of envelopes you can send in each month, along with limits on how much scanned content the service will host for you. After it's scanned, it's sent back in the same mailer, which can be chucked in with your paper recycling--envelope and all.

It's worth noting that for things like school papers and general writing, Scribd.com has a free program called Paper-to-iPaper that lets you send in all sorts of paper items by mail (at your postal expense) complete with OCR. One thing to note, however is that you have to get the content pre-approved, and things like bills and notes scribbled on paper are not welcome.

Pixily plans start at a free level (which requires you sending in documents on your own dime), all the way up to a $60/month plan that serves up four envelopes a month for you to stuff.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Pixily requires using the mail to get your documents online, although if you've got PDFs lying around, you can send those digitally to go alongside your scanned docs. CNET Networks