So far, most of my posts center on how to prevent and deal with new mail coming in.  Subscribing to paperless billing will only happen for future statements and bills.  Renting a postal mailbox online reduces your future junk mail.  But what if you want to turn your old bills, statements, and mail into digital copies?

There are actually a few services that does this for you.  I will not discuss companies that offer digital archiving of your photos, videos, etc.  We focus specifically on companies that work on papers. Today, I want to introduce one that I recently came across.

“Put your paper docs online in 3 to 5 days”

I recently read about Pixily from a blog post on WebWorkDaily.  Considering that it has to deal with paper (and postal mail to some extent), I took a quick tour of its website.  In Pixily’s own words, copied directly from their web page:

Pixily is an online service that helps you save time, space and money by making your paper and digital documents available at your fingertips. You no longer need to deal with paper clutter and don’t have to worry about not finding an important document when you need it. Pixily combines your paper and digital documents online in a secure location, making them available to you from anywhere. With Pixily, you can search your documents for any keywords, securely share your documents, and easily organize your documents using Pixily’s labeling tools.

I went through their demo and checked out their pricing.

The Pixily Good

What immediately drew my attention was the “reverse” effect of Pixily’s service.  Online postal mailboxes receives mail, scans and puts the mail online, and allows you to read your postal mail online.  Pixily, on the other hand, makes you mail them your paper docs (which, in my particular context, refer to bills, statements, and other postal mail).  They then scan the docs and let you view your own docs online. For $15 a month, you can mail in an envelope filled with paper docs and have a maximum of 3000 pages scanned.  Their highest pricing plan goes up to $60 a month, which gives you 4 envelopes a month and 12,000 pages scanned.  Their lowest – free with 200 pages uploaded, but no free envelopes.

What I see good with this service is that you can take digital snapshots of all your old bills, statements, and old postal mail.  I certainly keep all my old bills in a box somewhere for 7 years in case I get audited by the IRS.  That comes up to quite a bit of paper docs hanging around collecting dust in my garage and closet.  I envision Pixily will make my life easier by putting all my docs in one place.

Once I have all my docs in digital format, I can shred and recycle the old paper, and save a tree while I’m at it.  Well, Pixily claims on their front page that I save a tree for every 10,000 pages that I recycle.

After this, all my mail will be in digital format.  Sounds like a great plan to reduce my mail and paper docs (now officially considered junk mail since I no longer need it anymore).

The Pixily Bad

There are several concerns I have about using Pixily.  I read a comment posted by a user saying that the service is great, but it’s inconvenient only getting 4 envelopes a month when you are on the high price plan.  Each additional envelope you want is an extra $15 each.  This user submitted to the forces of economics and decided to compile all his paper docs and mail them in together on a weekly basis.  However, if there are some documents that I would love to have scanned and digitized as soon as possible, then I must essentially pay $15 for that document.  This would be cheap if I am submitting a 300 page documents, but likely, it might be in the 10-50 page range.  They do offer a per sheet scanning for $0.15 per page.  So a 30 page document would be $4.50 plus postage.

Other than that, I really do have nothing bad to say.

How I would use Pixily

Realistically, for those of you who follow my advice so far, I foresee using this service for the first one or two months, especially when paired with an online postal mailbox solution that is much cheaper and eliminates the effort of having me to constantly forward my postal mail to Pixily.

So this is what I would actually do if I were a EarthMailFree reader:

  • Sign up with Pixily for one month.  For $15, I can scan 3000 pages of my old bills and postal mail leftovers.  That should cover quite a lot of my own junk.  If I really do have more pages to scan, I can pay for a higher level plan.  I consider this to be a one-time deal for doing the work of scanning the docs for me.
  • Meanwhile, I would sign up for an online postal mailbox at either Earth Class Mail or MyPostalMail.  It would take about a month or so to reroute my mail over to the new mailbox.  While I’m at it, I’ll sign up for paperless billing too.  After this, I foresee very little use of using the scanning service.
  • Cancel my pixily account and then get all my mail scanned for cheaper monthly fees.  What’s more, I am helping to save the environment.

This is a rather specific use case.  For those who actually do get constant physical documents (invoices, payables, contracts, etc) and need those scanned, the service seems much more enticing.  However, if I were such a heavy user, then I do see that even 4 envelopes is insufficient for my needs.  The true cost of scanning additional sheets and using additional envelopes now becomes much higher than $60 a month.  Forces of economics once again dominate my choice.  Wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to worry about such variable costs to begin with?

Final Words

Overall, I am impressed with Pixily.  I would recommend that you take a look and see if it fits your needs.  But please note that I am not here to recommend whether these services are good or bad.  Do your own research.  If you actually do try it, I would love to hear about your experience, for better or worse.

Do note that in my reviews, I prefer not to discuss whether the business makes sense or whether it makes money. I am focused more on the environmental impact and on how services can create win-win situations for both the users like us and the environment at the same time.  I leave business criticisms up to others.