The need

Migrants lose years scrambling for documents they never knew they'd need. Five years after arriving, a citizenship form asks for every trip abroad with exact dates, proof of address for each year and tax records for each job, and the boarding passes, rent receipts and payslips are scattered across old inboxes and lost phones. A single missing month can delay an application or force a refusal.

What exists and what is new

Closest: government eVisa and application status pages, official presence calculators you fill in by hand, and general document scanners or cloud drives. They show status or store files, but none of them collects evidence as life happens. New: continuous, quiet evidence collection organised by the rules of the application you will make later, with a live day counter, gap detection ("missing: April rent receipt"), reminders when a document arrives that should be kept, and an application-ready pack at the end.

The data it runs on

Your own payslips, rent receipts, tax letters, permits and travel dates, found in connected mail and folders with read-only access and narrow sender filters, plus boarding passes, calendar entries and card statements for travel. A rules table per country and application type (days needed, look-back window, documents per year) drives the counters, always labelled as general information with a link to the official calculator.

The mission

Your life abroad should already be proven by the time you need to prove it. Paper Trail keeps the record while you live, so the biggest application of your life takes an evening, not a year of panic.

Why people can't resist it

• A number that only goes up. The day counter toward eligibility is quietly motivating, like a savings goal for belonging.
• Fear of the missing month. A red gap with a one-tap fix is impossible to ignore.
• Zero effort. It works in the background; the only action is "Save it" when something arrives.

How it works for real

1. Connectors: read-only mail and folder access with sender and keyword filters chosen by the user (payroll, landlord, airlines, tax agency).
2. Classification: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) labels each document (payslip, rent receipt, tax notice, boarding pass) and extracts dates and amounts; a vision model reads photos and scanned PDFs.
3. Travel reconstruction: boarding passes first, then calendar entries and card statements as fallbacks, reconciled by plain code into a trip list with confidence.
4. Rules engine: plain code per application type computes day counts, look-back windows and gaps; the model never decides eligibility.
5. Requests: a frontier LLM (Claude) drafts polite requests for missing documents; the user approves before anything is sent.
6. Pack builder: orders, names and merges files to match the official checklist, with a table of contents.

Cost per use

Initial scan of 5 years of mail (filtered to about 2,000 messages): $0.30 to $0.80. Ongoing: about $0.05 a month per user. Building a pack: about $0.05. Free: one goal, the day counter and manual uploads. Paid ($4 a month, or $29 a year): connected mail and folders, gap alerts, requests and pack export. A solo builder with 2,000 paying users clears model costs many times over.

Growth loop

Counters get shared ("Day 900 of 1,095 in Canada"), and the finished pack is a moment people talk about in community groups. Partners and spouses join because a family application needs both histories, and immigration advisers recommend it to clients because organised evidence saves them hours.

Risks and guardrails

• General information, not legal or immigration advice; every rule links to the official source and calculator.
• Read-only access with narrow filters; no message is deleted, moved or sent without approval.
• Sensitive files are encrypted; the user can export and wipe everything in one tap.
• Day counts show uncertainty ("1 trip estimated from a card statement") rather than false precision.
• No sharing with any government or adviser unless the user approves the exact pack.

MVP build order

1. Canada citizenship day counter with manual trip entry.
2. Mail connector with filters and document classification for payslips, rent and tax.
3. Boarding pass detection and gap highlighting.
4. "Save it" proactive cards and drafted requests.
5. Pack export, then Ireland and UAE rule sets.

People, employers, landlords and dates in this demo are fictional samples. Rules are summarised as general information, not legal advice.