If you've ever tried to grep a PDF you scanned six months ago, you already know why paperless-ngx exists. It's a Django + Postgres + Redis application that watches a folder, runs OCR on whatever you drop in, extracts metadata, applies tags, and serves the result through a searchable web UI and a REST API you can actually script against. We ran a paperless-ngx instance against roughly 1,800 receipts, contracts, and PDFs over the past several weeks to see whether the "self-hosted alternative to Evernote/Dropbox" pitch holds up for developers who'd rather own their data and wire their own automations. Short version: it does, but the operational footprint and the gaps in classification accuracy are worth knowing before you commit a weekend to it. The stack you're actually running Paperless-ngx ships as a Docker Compose bundle.…