Hey 👋

cDox started as a question, not a business plan. Why do our most important documents live somewhere we never think about, governed by rules we never agreed to, on infrastructure we don't really understand? For a long time I just accepted that as the cost of convenience. Most of us do.

Working internationally changed how I think about data. I've seen how differently countries treat the same information, how fast assumptions about privacy fall apart once you cross a border, and how two identical-looking tools can mean two completely different levels of trust depending on where the servers actually sit. Data stops feeling abstract once you realize it lives in real buildings, in real countries, under real laws. "The cloud" is just a nice way of not saying that.

A small number of companies now hold an enormous share of the world's documents. Most people never really chose that. They chose tools that were fast, familiar, and free, which is a completely reasonable thing to do. It just comes with trade-offs nobody points out at the moment you sign up: where your data lives, who can access it, and what happens to it later.

cDox is my attempt at a different default. Not a platform, not an ecosystem, not a place that also wants to chat with you, manage your projects, and train a model on what you write. Just a calm, reliable place to write, hosted here in Canada, that stays out of your way.

I'm keeping it small on purpose. No investors pushing for growth at any cost, no ads, no training AI models on your work, no feature added just because a competitor shipped one. If it doesn't make cDox better at being a calm place to write, it doesn't go in.

Boring, in the best way. Predictable, transparent, dependable. I'm writing this from Victoria, BC, Canada, where I also run a Bike Gear Database, but the servers actually doing cDox's work are humming away in Montreal. cDox isn't trying to win. It's trying to be worth trusting with your words, for a long time.

You don't have to take my word for any of it.

Try cDox yourself. It's free to start, nothing important is hidden behind a sales call, and your export button always works.

— Barry