FreeEed for FOIA

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FOIA & Public-Records Processing

Answer public-records requests on a machine you control.

FreeEed ingests your email and files, lets you search and cull down to exactly what’s responsive, and exports clean PDFs — all self-hosted, so nothing ever leaves the building. Free and open source.

Free & open sourceRuns on your own hardware10+ years in e-discovery
Why self-hosted matters here

Public records contain things that can’t go to the cloud.

Personal information. Exempt material. Student and personnel data. FreeEed runs entirely on your own machine or server — no upload, no third party, no per-gigabyte cloud bill. When AI assists, it runs locally, so you can certify that nothing was ever sent out. It’s the same court-defensible, on-prem approach agencies and firms already trust for litigation, brought to public records.

The appliance

One request, one clean machine.

Download the FreeEed appliance, spin up a fresh virtual machine for each request, load the records, and work the whole thing in one self-contained place. When you’re done, archive or delete the VM.

Isolated

Each request lives in its own environment — a clean chain of custody, with no crossover between matters.

Boot and go

Runs on the virtualization you already have — VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Proxmox. No install, no dependency hunt.

Yours

Self-hosted on your hardware, free to run forever. No account to keep, no data held hostage.

The workflow

From a pile of email to a finished response.

01

Ingest

Pull in email, PST and mbox exports, and loose files — including exports from Google Vault and Microsoft 365.

02

Search & cull

Full-text search across everything, then narrow to what’s actually responsive to the request.

03

Review

Read and tag documents in a browser-based review view.

04

Produce

Export the responsive documents as individual PDFs, ready to hand off.

Common path for schools and agencies on Google Workspace: Google Vault → mbox → FreeEed → PDF.
Built for public budgets

No per-page pricing. No lock-in.

FreeEed is free and open source — every feature, including local AI, works whether you pay or not. Optional support is a flat rate, never billed by volume or by the gigabyte. Cancel anytime and your work keeps running.

  • Free forever for the full desktop tool
  • Optional support at a flat monthly rate — never per gigabyte
  • Built for the small agencies the litigation platforms were never priced for
Optional support
$50 / month

Continuous updates, support, and hosted capabilities. Flat — no volume charge, ever.

Start free

The gap in the field

The desktop tool the field said should exist.

Researchers studying FOIA keep pointing at the same gap: there are plenty of tools for litigation e-discovery, but almost nothing built for the records analyst at a smaller agency — a desktop tool they can actually run themselves. That’s exactly what FreeEed is: self-hosted, installs today, with the full processing pipeline behind it.

Coming next

AI-assisted exemption review to help flag material under common FOIA exemptions — with a human making every call. Want to help shape it on your real workflow? Become a design partner →

Try it on your next request.

Download FreeEed, run it on your own machine, and take a real records request through end to end. It’s free.