Papermark — the open-source DocSend alternative. Secure, modern, and built in the open.
Today I'm excited to share more about Papermark, the open-source alternative to DocSend we've been building for the last months.
If you've ever sent a pitch deck, a sales proposal, or an investor update, you've probably used DocSend. It works — but it's closed, expensive, and the features haven't meaningfully moved in years. We thought document sharing deserved a better foundation: open source, modern, and actually secure.
What Papermark is
Papermark is a document sharing platform for teams that want to know what happens after they hit "send". You upload a PDF (or Notion doc, or Word file), get a secure link, and see exactly how the recipient engages — page by page, second by second.
The difference:
- Open source. Every line is on GitHub. Self-host it, fork it, audit it. No black box.
- Modern stack. Next.js, TypeScript, Postgres, Tailwind. It feels like 2024, not 2014.
- Secure by default. Email verification, password protection, link expiration, watermarking, and full access revocation.
- Your branding. Custom domains and branded viewers without an enterprise upgrade.
Why open source matters here
Document sharing is a trust product. When you send a confidential deck to an investor or a contract to a client, you're trusting the tool with your most sensitive files.
Closed-source tools ask you to trust them on faith. Open source lets you verify. You can read exactly how we handle your files, how access control works, and how we store data. And if something is missing, you can contribute it — which is exactly what dozens of people have already done.
What we have today
- Upload PDFs and share via secure links
- Real-time analytics: who opened, which pages, for how long
- Custom domains and branded viewers
- Email verification & password-protected links
- Notion integration
- Self-hosting docs and a one-click deploy
What's next
- Data rooms — a full replacement for Docsend Spaces and traditional VDRs
- Video documents with per-second analytics
- Granular team permissions and SSO
- A no-friction way for recipients to sign and return documents
Try it
The fastest way to see it is to just use it:
- Hosted: papermark.com
- Source: github.com/mfts/papermark
- Self-host: one click on Vercel
If you try it and something feels off, email me directly — marc@mfts.io. I read every message and I'm the person who's going to fix it.
Document sharing shouldn't be a black box. We're building the version we wanted to use ourselves.