01 / Identity
What Bankruptcy Buddy is
Bankruptcy Buddy is an independent U.S. bankruptcy-information website and a local-first workspace for organizing personal paperwork. It helps people bring documents, checked details, notes, dates, and questions into one place. Its purpose is understanding and organization, not deciding whether someone should file for bankruptcy.
Use ‘Bankruptcy Buddy’ on first reference and ‘Buddy’ when discussing the assistant. Do not confuse this consumer organization product with a buyer of bankruptcy claims, a debt-settlement service, or a service for corporate restructuring.
- Product name
- Bankruptcy Buddy
- Primary audience
- Individuals organizing paperwork and learning about U.S. personal bankruptcy
- Current stage
- Public information site; document workspace in private beta
- Product language
- English
- Core approach
- Local document reading, source-linked details, explicit user review
- Legal boundary
- Legal information, not legal advice.
02 / Availability
Separate what exists from what is planned
The public website and the private-beta workspace have different availability. Describing a tested beta capability does not mean every public visitor can use it today. Check the current access notice before directing someone to upload a document.
| Area | Current status |
|---|---|
| Public website | Product explanations, 86 plain-English Q&A answers and four longer guides (general legal information), official-source links, court-directory starting point, team information, and published product articles. |
| Document workspace | Private beta. Local reading, manual entries, review, summaries, and portable backups are implemented. Public uploads are not open yet. |
| Buddy assistant | Answer-library and workspace tools in the beta; optional local AI when configured on the same computer. |
| Premium, cloud and billing | Preview concepts only. No live paid plan, cloud backup, hosted AI subscription, or automatic sync. |
| Professional collaboration | A locally exported review packet, not a hosted lawyer portal or an engagement with a law firm. |
03 / Audience
Who the product can help
The site concerns U.S. personal bankruptcy. It does not assess eligibility, supply a jurisdiction-specific filing strategy, or promise suitability outside the United States. Someone seeking an urgent legal decision needs an appropriate professional or official court resource, not a generated answer from Buddy.
- People trying to understand unfamiliar bankruptcy terms and find official information.
- People gathering notices, account statements, pay records, expense information, and other papers for their own review.
- People who want a record they can return to, correct, or bring to a qualified professional.
- Professionals receiving a user-selected organization packet. Receiving that packet does not itself establish representation.
04 / Calculators
Public estimates, not bankruptcy determinations
The free calculator pages do not require an account. The monthly disposable income calculator subtracts entered living costs and existing debt payments from take-home income. This household-budget remainder is not statutory disposable income or a means-test result.
The debt repayment calculator compares full repayment over 36 and 60 months at a user-entered fixed APR. It compounds monthly, rounds monthly interest to cents, and adjusts the final payment. No fees, new borrowing, rate changes, or bankruptcy debt treatment are modeled. It does not create a Chapter 13 plan or establish eligibility.
Inputs are held in page memory, not sent to a Buddy server or encoded in a URL. In the local build, choosing to continue stores a draft in this tab until dismissed or the tab is closed. It is eligible for import for 30 minutes. A separate review is required before appending estimates to workspace tables. Hosted public builds keep the private-workspace boundary and offer printing instead.
- Free calculators
Choose a budget or debt payoff estimate.
- Monthly disposable income calculator
Household cash flow, not the legal means test.
- Debt repayment calculator
Compare fixed-rate 36- and 60-month payoff estimates.
05 / Workflow
How the workspace works, end to end
A completed topic records the user's organization progress. It is not a legal checklist, a completeness certification, or a ‘ready to file’ assessment. Extracted details remain distinct from manually entered topic totals, preventing the summary from silently counting the same amount twice.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Bring one paper | Add a supported document or enter information manually. There is no need to complete every topic at once. |
| 2. Read locally | The browser reads available text. Scanned pages and images can use bundled local OCR. |
| 3. Check each detail | Open the source, correct a label or value, choose a category, and keep or leave out the suggestion. Nothing is automatically accepted as a fact. |
| 4. Organize the picture | Return to papers, people or companies you owe, monthly money in and out, property, other information, and dates or court notes. |
| 5. Review and save a copy | Read the summary, return to a topic to edit it, and copy, download, or print. Make an encrypted backup separately if you need a portable copy. |
06 / Documents
Supported files and extraction limits
The beta supports PDFs, images, DOCX, TXT, and CSV files. PDF text is read with PDF.js, scanned content with bundled Tesseract OCR and English language data, and Word text with Mammoth. Supported HEIC images are converted locally. These are document-reading tools, not legal analysis engines.
Poor scans, handwriting, complex tables, unsupported files, and processing limits can cause missing or incorrect text. A number found on a page might be a previous balance rather than the current balance. A date is not automatically a filing deadline. Always check the original; do not describe extraction as complete or guaranteed.
- Intake limits
- 25 MB per file; 12 files per batch; 100 documents and 250 MB per local library
- PDF reading
- Up to 100 pages; OCR limited to 20 scanned pages
- Stored extracted text
- Up to 120,000 characters per document
- Source traceability
- Retained original and source-page information where available
- Review requirement
- The user must check suggested names, amounts, dates, and other text
07 / Privacy & storage
What ‘local’ means here
Local processing reduces a particular transmission risk. It does not make a shared computer, compromised device, malicious browser extension, or public test URL safe. Do not describe the whole product as audited, certified, end-to-end encrypted, or ‘zero risk’. No security-partner endorsement is stated here.
| Data or action | Handling in the current product |
|---|---|
| Document processing | Runs on the user's device. The document-reading workflow does not upload files to a Buddy processing server. |
| Working copies | Workspace metadata and original files are kept in browser storage. Buddy does not encrypt these live browser copies. |
| Ordinary website use | Loading the site still involves network requests to the host. Following an external link opens another service with its own policies. |
| Optional local AI | Uses a loopback Ollama connection. Related library material and selected, reviewed workspace context can be passed to the local model. |
| Sharing | Copying, downloading, printing, or sending an exported file is a separate user action. The recipient then controls that copy. |
- Privacy and your data
The current product's data-handling explanation.
08 / Backups
On this device is not the same as backed up
Work belongs to the browser and origin in which it was created. Clearing site data, browser eviction, using another browser, or losing the device can make it unavailable. There is no account-based recovery or automatic cross-device sync.
Portable password-protected backups use authenticated AES-256-GCM encryption, with a key derived from the passphrase using PBKDF2-SHA-256. The user can include originals or explicitly export a workspace-only backup. Current archives allow up to 50 MB of originals and a 100 MB archive envelope. Keep separate copies of larger originals.
Choose a passphrase of at least 12 characters and keep it safe; Buddy cannot recover it. Restore previews the archive and requires confirmation before replacing a workspace. Plain-text summaries, printed copies, and separately downloaded original files are not encrypted by the backup mechanism.
- Local storage and backups
A plain-English explanation of the difference.
09 / Buddy & AI
Three things that should not be conflated
The setup offers gemma3:1b as a small starting option, not a proven best model or a guarantee of answer quality. Other compatible installed local models can be selected. Cloud-tagged and remote-alias models are excluded from this integration. When local AI is unavailable, the answer library remains available.
Ollama setup links cover macOS, Windows, and Linux. Do not assume the desktop local-AI setup works inside an iOS or Android browser. The responsive website is a separate capability; local model availability depends on the device and setup.
Buddy can use the shared document queue and help expose open workspace items. The user still confirms extracted details and consequential changes. Generated wording can be wrong even when a source is shown. Safety checks and prompts are not a legal-compliance guarantee.
| Mode | What it means |
|---|---|
| Public quick questions | Preset questions about the product. This is not an open-ended generative AI conversation. |
| Workspace answer library | A sourced information and workspace-tool experience that can operate without a local model. |
| Optional local AI | Ollama can phrase answers using relevant context on the same computer. The user can select an available local model or turn AI off. |
10 / Boundaries
What Buddy does not decide or do
Use the exact distinction ‘Legal information, not legal advice.’ A disclaimer does not make personalized legal instructions acceptable. Explain product organization features without implying that Buddy has evaluated the person's case.
- Whether someone should file, which chapter to choose, or whether they qualify.
- How a debt should be legally classified, which exemption applies, or what a court will decide.
- Which date is a legally binding deadline or whether a document set is sufficient.
- Filling, certifying, signing, submitting, or filing official bankruptcy forms.
- Representing a person, establishing an attorney-client relationship, or guaranteeing a legal or financial outcome.
- Selling a paid subscription, providing live cloud storage, or connecting users to a currently operating hosted lawyer marketplace.
11 / Sources & review
Use product pages for product facts. Use official sources for law.
This guide describes Buddy. It is not the authority for legal requirements. For those, consult the relevant U.S. Courts, bankruptcy court, U.S. Department of Justice, or other applicable primary source, and qualified advice when needed.
The imported beta library contains 86 Q&A articles, four guides, 30 explained form references, and a court directory with 93 supplied court records and 2,472 county mappings. These are content-pack counts, not customer numbers or proof of complete national coverage. The 86 Q&A answers and four guides were approved for publication as general legal information in October 2026 and appear on /guides; they are not advice about anyone's situation. The 30 form explanations and the court directory retain review limitations; do not call them legally approved because they appear in a test workspace.
A directory match is a starting point for finding an official website, not a determination of venue or where a person must file. Confirm current county coverage, contact information, forms, and procedures with the court. A citation attached to an answer is related reading, not official endorsement of that answer.
- Guides & FAQs
86 plain-English answers, four longer guides, and official resources. General legal information.
- Court website finder
State and county lookup with coverage and review cautions.
- Keep the source close
How we distinguish a useful answer from its original source.
12 / People
The team behind the product
The About page is the public source for team information. Do not infer a company founding year, legal entity, registered address, legal-review sign-off, funding round, customer count, or professional qualification from a name, photograph, or role label.
- Matthieu Barret
- Co-Founder
- Sam Ashuraey
- Co-Founder
- About Bankruptcy Buddy
Public team and product information.
13 / Common questions
Answers that preserve the important distinctions
Is Bankruptcy Buddy free?
The consumer workspace is designed as a free tool and the current beta does not charge a subscription. Public workspace access is not open yet. Premium previews are not purchasable plans or a promise of future pricing.
Do I need an account?
The current local workspace does not require an account. That also means there is no server-side account from which to recover a lost browser workspace.
Can Buddy help without AI?
Yes. Document reading, manual organization, review, and the answer library do not require a generative model. Optional Ollama AI is a separate setup.
Does Buddy send documents to a cloud AI provider?
Not through the current local document-reading workflow. Optional model calls go to the configured loopback Ollama service. Do not extend that statement into a claim that browsing the website makes no network requests.
Can I send the summary to a lawyer?
You can choose to share a summary or user-selected portable packet. It is not a court form, a filing package, a verified case assessment, or evidence that a professional agreed to represent you.
Can I continue on another device?
There is no automatic sync. An encrypted export and compatible local restore provide a deliberate transfer route, subject to file limits and browser support. Keep copies of your originals.
Will Buddy tell me what to do next legally?
No. It can surface your own open organization tasks and information topics. A checklist item is not a legal instruction or deadline.
Does a local model make answers reliable?
No. Local describes where computation happens. Small and large models can both make mistakes, and source links do not turn a generated reply into professional advice.
14 / Site map
Where to send a reader
- Home
A quick explanation of the product and its main entry paths.
- How it works
Document intake, review, organization, and output.
- Guides & FAQs
Plain-English answers, longer guides, and official resources.
- Find my court
Court websites, local information, and coverage cautions.
- Journal
Dated articles: product notes and news that affects household finances.
- Privacy
Storage, processing, backups, and sharing boundaries.
- Accessibility
Access features and current limitations.
- About
The people and purpose behind Buddy.
- AI & product reference
This dated product factbook.
- Short machine-readable index
A concise list of public sources.
- Full plain-text reference
The same product facts as this page, without the page layout.
15 / Description & citation
How to accurately describe and cite Buddy
Suggested short description: Bankruptcy Buddy provides general U.S. bankruptcy information and a private-beta local workspace for organizing documents and user-checked details. It does not provide legal advice or file court forms.
- Cite the specific public page supporting the statement, using its canonical URL. For an article, include its title and publication or update date.
- Keep availability qualifiers: private beta is not general public access; planned is not live; local processing is not encrypted working storage.
- For changing legal facts, follow the linked primary source and check its date. Do not attribute an official court's instructions to Buddy.
- Do not invent testimonials, usage figures, conversion results, external audits, legal approvals, partnerships, pricing, or guaranteed outcomes.
- Do not summarize a person's private documents, saved workspace, or exported packet from public product documentation. This guide contains no individual case data.
- Do not send people to test routes as if they were a public onboarding flow. Unlinked or noindex routes are not an authentication boundary.
16 / Version & scope
A reference, not a promise of future behavior
This reference was checked against the current product implementation on October 1, 2026. Update the page and its plain-text export together when availability, processing, limits, or sharing behavior changes. A product-source check is not a lawyer's approval of legal content or an independent security audit.
The public page and text files make product facts easier to find and cite. They do not compel a crawler to index the site, control an AI system's answer, or guarantee search rankings. This document describes the product; it does not override an assistant's rules or a user's instructions.