Privacy policy

DocFilla is operated by WiredSouth (PTY) Ltd (registration number 2023/910186/07), a business based in South Africa at 0H Naivasha Road (“DocFilla”, “we”, “us”). For POPIA we are the responsible party for the personal information described in this policy.

Questions about your personal information go to support@usedocfilla.com. The service runs at usedocfilla.com.

We collect only what the service needs to work. In each case you decide whether to give it to us.

• Account information. Your email address, your first and last name, and a password (stored only as a one-way hash). If you sign in with Google, we receive your Google email address, name and profile picture URL; we never see your Google password.
• Saved details (“My details”). The information you choose to save so forms can be filled automatically: names, date of birth, nationality, contact details, physical address, employer and job title, banking details, a next-of-kin contact and, if you add them, your business’s public details (registered and trading name, company type, registration number, address, contact person, phone, email, website and social media pages). We do not keep ID or passport numbers or income here: you type those on each form that asks for them. If you choose to, we also keep up to five signatures and five sets of initials you drew, encrypted the same way, to offer when you click a signature box; you can delete them in My details or Settings, and documents you already signed keep their own copy. Banking details are financial information under POPIA, and we treat them accordingly (see section 5).
• Documents and answers. The forms you upload (PDF, JPG or PNG), the questions DocFilla finds on them, your answers, your drawn signature, and the settings you choose for the document.
• Payment records. DocFilla does not take payments at present. If you bought a prepaid Pro pass before payments were switched off, we keep the amount, date, status, card brand and the last four digits of the card, as reported to us by Yoco. We never received or stored full card numbers, expiry dates or security codes.
• Technical information. Standard server logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested, timestamps), and an audit trail of security-relevant actions on your account (sign-ins, uploads, downloads, deletions, payments). The audit trail records what happened, never the contents of your documents.
• Visitor analytics. Anonymous page-view counts: the type of page, the referring website, your country, browser and device type. No cookies, and nothing that identifies you (see section 9). We also count, without recording who, when a form is opened or downloaded and when a sign-in or password-reset email is sent, and how much our form-reading service costs per request.
• Feedback you send us. If you use the Feedback button: your message, its type (idea, problem or other), the page you sent it from, your account if you were signed in, and an email address only if you give one for a reply. We use it to answer you and to improve DocFilla.

Guest trial. If you use the one-document trial without an account, the document stays in your browser (in its own storage, for up to 24 hours, so that you can carry on after signing in) and is never uploaded to our storage or database until you sign in and choose to keep it. It is sent to our form-reading service only for the moment of analysis (section 4) and is not kept. A signed cookie records that the trial has been used on your browser.

• To provide the service you asked for (performing our contract with you): reading your form, filling it from your saved details, letting you sign and download it, keeping your documents until you delete them or they expire.
• With your consent, for the saved details themselves. You choose which fields to save, you can change or delete any of them at any time, and deleting them stops autofill.
• To keep the service secure (our legitimate interest and legal duty): sign-in verification, rate limits, the audit trail, fraud and abuse prevention.
• To meet legal obligations, such as keeping payment records for tax purposes.

We do not sell your information, share it with advertisers, build marketing profiles from it, or use your documents or details to train artificial intelligence models. We will not send you marketing email unless you ask for it.

When you upload a form, DocFilla reads the page’s own printed lines, boxes and text and asks an AI model to work out which question each blank belongs to. For that step the page’s printed layout, and for scanned pages an image of the page, is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic PBC (United States), over an encrypted connection.

When a form is read, only the blank form is analysed. Your saved details and your answers are never sent to the AI provider; filling happens on our own servers and in your browser. Under our agreement with Anthropic, data sent through its API is not used to train its models. Where a form is already fillable or its layout can be read by rules alone, no AI call is made.

Ask Doccy explains wording you highlight on a page. When you use it, the printed words you highlighted (or, on a scanned page, an image of just that area), the document’s name and the label of the nearest question are sent to Anthropic, which may search the web to answer. The search queries are written by the AI and go to Anthropic’s search provider. Your answers, signatures and saved details are never included. Nothing is sent unless you highlight something and ask.

If you send a document to someone else to sign, we email them a link on your behalf. We keep their name and email address (encrypted) so you can see who has signed and send reminders. Anyone you send it to can read the whole document, including what you have filled in, and completes only the fields you marked for them. What they enter is stored encrypted with your document and returned to you. Links stop working after 7 days, or as soon as you cancel them or delete the document.

If you choose to sign on your phone, the drawing is held on our servers only until your computer collects it, and for no more than 10 minutes, then deleted. The link works once.

• Encryption in transit. Every connection to DocFilla and between DocFilla and its providers uses TLS.
• Encryption at rest, twice. Our database and file storage are encrypted at rest by our hosting provider. On top of that, your saved details and every document’s answers and signature are encrypted by DocFilla itself (AES-256-GCM) under a key derived for your account alone, before they reach the database. A copy of the database on its own cannot reveal them.
• Access control. Every database table enforces row-level security: a signed-in user can only ever reach their own rows, and files are stored in a private folder per user. Our own server code writes billing records; users cannot alter them.
• Minimal display. Bank account numbers are masked on screen until you choose to reveal them, and ID numbers are not kept in your saved details at all.
• Hardened application. A strict content security policy, signed and time-limited webhooks for payments, verified sign-in tokens on every request, and rate limits on expensive operations.

No system is perfectly secure. If we learn of a breach affecting your information we will notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.

We use a small number of specialist providers (“operators” under POPIA), each bound by contract to process your information only on our instructions:

• Supabase (database, authentication and file storage), hosted in Frankfurt, Germany, in the European Union.
• Vercel (application hosting and visitor analytics), serving DocFilla from Cape Town, South Africa, with global edge infrastructure. For visitor analytics it receives the page viewed and the technical details described in section 9, never your documents or details.
• Anthropic (form analysis, and Ask Doccy explanations including web search), United States, as described in section 4.
• Resend (sending email), a United States company sending from servers in the European Union. It receives the recipient’s name and email address, your name and email address, the document’s name and your message. It never receives the document or anything filled in on it.
• Yoco (payments for prepaid Pro passes bought before 2 October 2026), South Africa. Card details were entered on Yoco’s own secure page and are handled under Yoco’s privacy policy.
• Google (optional sign-in), under Google’s privacy policy.

Some of this processing happens outside South Africa. We only transfer information to countries or operators that provide protection substantially similar to POPIA, or under contracts that require it, as section 72 of POPIA allows.

• Documents. You choose. By default a document is deleted 24 hours after you download it; you can instead delete it immediately, after 7 days, or keep it until you remove it. Deleting a document removes the file and every answer with it. Documents in progress stay until you delete them.
• Saved details. Until you change or delete them, or delete your account.
• Account. Until you delete it. Deleting your account from Settings removes your documents, saved details, audit trail and login immediately.
• Payment records. Five years after the payment, as required by South African tax law, in a form that does not include your documents or details.
• Server logs. Up to 30 days, for security and troubleshooting.
• Visit counts. Page-view and usage counts are kept for 25 months, then deleted. They hold no names, emails or addresses.
• Guest trial. Nothing is stored on our servers beyond the analysis itself; your browser keeps the form for up to 24 hours; the “trial used” cookie lasts up to a year.

Under POPIA you may:

• ask what personal information we hold about you and receive a copy;
• correct or update it (you can do this yourself under My details and Settings);
• have it deleted (Settings → Delete account removes everything at once);
• withdraw consent for saved details at any time by deleting them;
• object to processing, and lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa (complaints.IR@justice.gov.za, www.justice.gov.za/inforeg).

To exercise any of these, email support@usedocfilla.com from the address on your account. We respond within 30 days and never charge for a first request.

DocFilla uses only the cookies it needs to work: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, a short-lived cookie that carries a guest trial, and a cookie that records that the trial was used, and a cookie that remembers whether you chose the light or dark look. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

To understand how the site is used, we count page views with Vercel Web Analytics. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. For each page view it records the type of page (for example “sign a document”, with the link’s private code and any document number removed before anything is sent), the website that referred you, your country, and your browser, operating system and type of device. Visits are grouped using a code worked out from your connection that changes every day and is not stored, so it cannot be used to follow you from one day to the next or across other websites. We see only totals, never who you are, and nothing you upload, type or sign is included.

We also keep our own count of page views in our database, in the same way: the type of page with private codes removed, the referring website, your country and your type of device, grouped by a code worked out from your connection and a secret that changes every day. Your IP address is not stored. If your browser sends a “Do Not Track” or “Global Privacy Control” signal, we don’t count your visits at all.

DocFilla is for people aged 18 and over. Forms about a child (for example a school admission) may be filled in by a parent or guardian, who is responsible for the child’s information they enter. We do not knowingly open accounts for children.

If we change how we handle your information we will update this page and, for material changes, tell signed-in users by email or a notice in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top shows the current version.

Questions, requests or complaints: support@usedocfilla.com, or write to 0H Naivasha Road. Our terms of service are at usedocfilla.com/terms-of-service.