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Blue Crane Works Blackbox Professional legacy document digitization
WSIB claims · Contracts · HR files · Job histories

Fifty years of paper. One sealed record.

Blackbox turns binders, boxes and filing cabinets into one structured digital document, then keeps custody of it. Built for firms that have to produce a record years after the person who filed it has gone.

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01 / The cabinet

A filing cabinet is not an archive.

It is four drawers of WSIB claims, signed contracts, HR files, equipment histories and permits, held together by the fact that nobody has needed one badly enough yet.

Nobody is going to retype it. And a scanner does not solve it either. It hands back four hundred loose images called scan_0001.jpg, which is the same problem in a different drawer.

02 / Capture

One tap, one page.
The shutter never waits.

Hold the phone over an open binder and tap. The photograph is written to the device before anything else is attempted: before the network, before the AI, before the counter even updates.

That order is deliberate. Legacy paper lives in basements, storage rooms and back offices, which is exactly where signal is worst. Losing connection, backgrounding the app or closing the tab does not cost you a page. Reopen it and the upload picks up where it stopped.

03 / The reading

It organises. It does not rewrite.

Two passes run over a document. The first reads each page on its own and records the text verbatim, including misspellings, archaic wording, and faded numbers marked as unreadable rather than guessed at. Pages it is unsure about are escalated to a stronger model automatically.

The second pass decides structure only: which sections exist, and which pages belong to them. It is not given any way to re-emit the text. The words in your finished document are the words that were read off the paper.

04 / What comes out

Every line knows which page it came from.

Below is genuine output, produced by the assembler that ships in the product. It is not a mockup. Each page carries two permanent identifiers: the capture number, the order it was photographed in, and the printed page number where the paper had one. The originals are kept, so any statement can be walked back to the photograph it came from.

Sample output, assembled document 5 pages · 4 sections

WSIB binder 1996–2004, box 3

Cover

capture 1

NORTHLINE MECHANICAL LTD. Health & Safety Program Revised March 1998

Scope and Application

p.1 (capture 2)

This program applies to all workers, subcontractors and visitors at every Northline job site. A copy shall be kept in the site trailer and made available to any inspector on request.

Worker Instruction

p.2 (capture 3)

The employer shall ensure that every worker is instructed in the hazards of the work before that worker begins. Instruction shall be recorded on Form NL-14 and retained for five years.

Forms

p.7 (capture 4)

FORM NL-14: WORKER ORIENTATION RECORD Worker: ______________________ Trade: _______________________ Date: ________________________ Topics covered: - Site-specific hazards - Emergency procedures and muster point - Personal protective equipment - Reporting of injuries and near misses

[stamp: Ministry of Labour received stamp, dated 14 APR 1998 · p.7 (capture 4)]

Unplaced pages. 1 page could not be filed under a section and appears below rather than being dropped.

p.8 (capture 5)

Reviewed with crew 04/14/98 by J. Braddock, Supervisor [illegible] second shift to be covered Monday

Printed numbers jump. That is the point.

Capture 4 is printed page 7. Real binders skip, restart and interleave, so the order you shot in and the number on the paper are recorded separately and both are kept.

A page it cannot file still ships.

The handwritten note above did not fit a section, so it appears under “Unplaced pages” and the document says so out loud. Losing a page of somebody’s claim file to a tidier outline is not a trade worth making.

Unreadable stays unreadable.

[illegible] is written where the paper could not be read. A number, name or date is never guessed at to make the output look complete.

05 / Where it is going

Scanning finishes. Custody does not.

Digitising a filing cabinet is a job with an end. Holding those records afterwards does not. Knowing who opened what, and being able to take that access away, is work with no end date. That is what Blackbox is being built toward, and it is the part still under construction.

Working today

  • ✓ Tap-to-capture, hundreds of pages per session
  • ✓ Offline-tolerant queue, so no page is lost to bad signal
  • ✓ Per-page verbatim reading, with escalation on hard pages
  • ✓ Structure-only assembly into one document
  • ✓ Capture number and printed page number throughout
  • ✓ Coverage reporting when a page cannot be filed
  • ✓ PDF of your finished document, to read, print or keep

In development, not available yet

  • · Sharing by controlled link instead of a loose file
  • · Per-viewer watermarking
  • · Revoking access from someone who has left
  • · Access log: who opened it, when, which pages
  • · Watermarked export for a recipient, logged
  • · Self-serve checkout and billing

We would rather say that plainly than sell you a feature list. If custody is the part you need, tell us. It decides what gets built next.

06 / Pricing

One plan. Three thousand pages a month.

Priced off what the reading actually costs, measured on real pages rather than estimated. That is why the allowance is what it is.

Blackbox
$59per month
  • ✓3,000 pages of reading included every month
  • ✓Unlimited documents, unlimited captures
  • ✓Verbatim per-page reading, with escalation on hard pages
  • ✓Structure-only assembly into one document
  • ✓Capture number and printed page number on every line
Need more in a heavy month? $25 adds 500 pages, as often as you like.

Capture is never limited

The allowance is on reading, never on photographing. Run out mid binder and the shutter keeps working, every page still saves and uploads, and the reading picks up exactly where it stopped once you top up. Nothing has to be shot twice.

No metered overage. Ever.

Per-page billing on a job this size is how a $59 plan turns into a four figure invoice that the customer finds out about on the statement. Blackbox stops instead, and asks.

Early access

Checkout is not switched on yet. The price is published so you know what this will cost before you commit a filing cabinet to it, not to take your money today.

Questions

How is this different from a scanner or a scanning service?

A scanner gives you several hundred loose image files. Blackbox gives you one document with structure, headings and searchable text, and it keeps the original captures so any line can be checked against the photograph it came from.

Does the AI rewrite my documents?

No. The first pass records each page verbatim. The second pass decides structure only and has no mechanism to re-emit text. The words in the finished document are the words that were read off the page. It organises; it does not author.

What happens if I lose signal halfway through a binder?

Nothing is lost. Every photograph is written to the phone before an upload is attempted, and the queue drains when a connection comes back. Backgrounding the app or closing the tab is also safe. Reopening resumes the same document with the pages already in it.

How accurate is it on old or handwritten paper?

Typed and printed pages read well. Pages that are blurry, cut off or heavily handwritten are flagged for review and escalated to a stronger model automatically. Handwriting is handled but not promised, and where the paper genuinely cannot be read the output says [illegible] rather than inventing something plausible.

What does it cost?

Pricing is not published yet. Capture and assembly work today and are being tested against real documents; the custody features a subscription would be for are still being built. Get in touch if you have a cabinet you want digitised and we will talk about it directly.

Where is my data processed?

Page images are stored in Microsoft Azure. AI processing runs on Azure OpenAI deployments in the United States. Your documents are never used to train AI models.

Who is behind it?

Blue Crane Works Inc., an Ontario company. Blackbox sits alongside the Blue Crane compliance app, CALIBER and Blue Crane Inventory. The same account works across all of them.

Got a cabinet nobody wants to open?

Blackbox is early and we are choosing the first documents carefully. If you have a real binder of claims, contracts or job histories, we would like to run it.

Ask about early access Open the app