ClerkAI
ClerkAI is a Dutch web tool that turns uploaded council documents into AI summaries, page-referenced action points and automatic tags, built for council clerks, council members and policy officers working with EU-hosted PDFs.
What is ClerkAI?
ClerkAI is a Dutch web application that reads council documents and turns them into something a busy public servant can act on. It is aimed squarely at the three groups the publisher names in its own English pages: council clerks working in the clerk's office, council members preparing for a session, and policy officers working through reports and legislation. The material it handles is the everyday output of Dutch local government, meaning council proposals, motions, memoranda, policy papers, meeting documents and budgets.
The input format is PDF and only PDF, including scanned or image-based files, which are read with OCR through Tesseract. From there the tool produces a summary shaped to the document type, extracts action points and decision points with a reference back to the page they came from, drafts neutral speaking notes that pose questions rather than pass judgement, applies thematic tags, and pulls out metadata such as title, document type, subject and meeting date. Everything lands in a shared team archive that can be searched and filtered by title, type, theme, committee and date, under two roles: administrator and member.
Under the hood the analysis runs through the OpenAI API, with OpenAI Ireland Ltd. acting as a sub-processor under a signed data processing agreement and an explicit commitment that customer documents are never used to train models. Documents are AES-encrypted through Laravel's Crypt layer before upload and stored on Cloudflare R2 in an EU jurisdiction, while the application and its database run on OVH SAS infrastructure in France. Security features include multi-factor authentication with passkeys (WebAuthn/FIDO2) or TOTP, with SMS deliberately refused on the grounds of NIST SP 800-63B, plus an audit log, ClamAV virus scanning and encrypted EU backups.
The positioning is openly comparative. The publisher argues that Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are general assistants, whereas ClerkAI is tooling built around municipal documents, shared archives and team roles. The limits are stated just as plainly: no full-text or semantic search, no public API and no mobile application. The site runs in Dutch and English, and the service is live, with a public status page carrying UptimeRobot measurements.
What it does
- Summarise a council document in a form that matches its type, with key points and decision points
- Extract action points and decision points, each carrying a reference back to the page it came from
- Upload one PDF or a whole batch by drag and drop, including scanned files read through OCR
- Generate neutral speaking notes that raise questions rather than deliver verdicts, sourced to the page
- Tag and file documents automatically by theme, per document and per meeting
- Search and filter the archive by title, type, theme, committee and date
- Share a document with the team in one click, or export the summary and action points as text or PDF
When to use ClerkAI / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if ClerkAI is the right fit.
When to use ClerkAI
- Clerk's offices that have to process a large stack of council documents before every meeting cycle
- Council members preparing for a session from thick agenda packs they did not write themselves
- Policy officers working through external reports, legislation and internal memoranda
- Public-sector organisations that require EU storage and a signed data processing agreement before they can buy
- Teams that want one shared, searchable archive with administrator and member roles rather than documents scattered across inboxes
When not to use ClerkAI
- Anyone whose material is not in PDF form, since ClerkAI is built for PDF documents and other formats are only handled on request
- Users who expect full-text or semantic search: retrieval is deliberately limited to metadata filters on title, type, theme, committee and date
- Developers who want to embed the analysis in their own systems, as there is no public API and no mobile application
- Occasional users hoping to get by on the free plan, which allows one upload and one AI summary per day and caps documents at 10 MB
- Anyone looking for a tool that will make the call for them: the publisher is explicit that the final judgement remains with the reader
How to use ClerkAI
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account: there is nothing to install and no IT department is needed
- Invite colleagues by email from the admin portal, without any involvement from ClerkAI
- Turn on multi-factor authentication with a passkey or a TOTP app; SMS is not offered
- On organisation plans, connect Google single sign-on, or ask for Microsoft Entra ID to be configured
- Drag a council proposal, motion or memorandum into the browser as a PDF; the analysis starts immediately
- From the Pro plan upwards, import a document by pasting a link instead of uploading a file
- Let the job run in the background, with paid plans going through a priority queue
- Read the summary and the action points, following the page references back into the source document
- Flag sensitive files as confidential if your organisation has switched AI processing off for them
- Share the result with the team in one click, or export it as text or PDF
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Real specialisation in Dutch council documents rather than another general-purpose chat assistant
- Summaries, action points and speaking notes all carry page references, so any claim can be traced back to the source
- Documents are AES-encrypted before upload and stored with backups in the EU, on a sub-processor chain named in full: OVH, Cloudflare R2, OpenAI Ireland, Resend, Namecheap PrivateEmail and Stripe
- A data processing agreement (version 1.1) is published online and can be signed, which is exactly what public buyers ask for first
- The commitment not to train models on customer documents is repeated across the site and written into article 4 of the DPA
- Support access to document content is explicit, temporary, revocable, logged and notified by email to administrators, with confidential documents excluded by default
- Low-risk entry: a permanent free plan with no card, a 14-day municipal trial, passkey-based MFA, a public status page and an accessibility statement targeting WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549
Cons
- The publisher is an eenmanszaak, a Dutch sole proprietorship, rather than a limited company, which is a supplier-risk question for any public procurement file
- No independent certification exists, neither ISO 27001 nor SOC 2 nor NEN 7510, and the accessibility statement states there has been no formal independent audit yet
- PDF only: other formats are handled on request rather than supported out of the box
- No full-text or semantic search, so finding a passage depends entirely on how documents were tagged and filed
- No public API and no mobile application, and Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on is only set up on request, Google being the standard
- The whole AI layer depends on one sub-processor, OpenAI, with possible transfers outside the EEA
- Contractual small print: unlimited AI usage is subject to a fair-use policy that can suspend processing, liability is capped at three months of fees with a maximum of 5,000 EUR, and no postal address is published on the site
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available at no cost and without a credit card, limited to one upload and one AI summary per day. The lowest paid entry point is the individual Pro plan at 19.00 EUR per user per month, excluding VAT, cancellable on a monthly basis. The organisation tiers are priced as team packages rather than per seat: 199 EUR per month for up to ten users and 499 EUR per month for up to fifty, with Enterprise pricing quoted on request. All prices exclude VAT, and paying annually gives two months free. Municipalities may also take a 14-day free trial of the complete Gemeente Basic package, again without providing a card.
- one AI summary and one upload per day
- 10 MB per document
- a personal archive and search by title
- summaries with no daily limit
- automatic action points and tags
- speaking notes
- 20 uploads per day
- import by link
- 25 MB per document
- filters on type
- theme
- shared archive
- uploads and summaries with no daily limit
- import by link
- 50 MB per document
- priority queue
- team roles
- Google SSO with Microsoft on request
- and a data processing agreement
- everything in Basis
- plus 100 MB per document
- priority queue and priority email support
- custom user and team numbers
- everything in Gemeente Pro
- dedicated support
- a dedicated contact and onboarding
- custom integrations and extended compliance options
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how ClerkAI handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is claimed explicitly and documented in unusual detail for a product of this size. The homepage presents the service as secure, GDPR-compliant and multilingual. The terms and the data processing agreement set the roles: the customer is controller, ClerkAI is processor. A DPA version 1.1 is published online, with a signed copy available through privacy@clerkai.nl. The legal bases cited are performance of the contract, legitimate interest for security and fraud prevention, and legal obligation. Data subject rights are listed in full, with a 30-day response window, and personal data breaches are reported to the controller within 72 hours. The supervisory authority named is the Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens. Transfers outside the EEA may occur through OpenAI Ireland Ltd. under Chapter V safeguards. Cookies are functional only. No certification is claimed anywhere.
Who owns the data?
Article 8 of the terms is unambiguous: the customer keeps every right to the documents and content they upload, and ClerkAI processes them exclusively to deliver the service. The GDPR roles follow the same split, stated in both the terms and the data processing agreement, with the customer acting as controller and ClerkAI as processor. The publisher repeats the point throughout the product as a plain promise that your data stays yours. Personal data may not be used to train AI models or for the publisher's own commercial purposes, and account data and documents can be exported from the user profile at any time.
Reuse rights
The customer retains all rights over what they upload, and the output follows: summaries, action points and speaking notes can be exported as text or PDF, or shared with colleagues through the team archive. On the publisher's side the purpose is single and narrow, namely generating summaries, action points, tags and metadata for the customer who uploaded the file. Document content is passed to OpenAI Ireland Ltd. as a further sub-processor under a signed agreement, and no model is trained on it. Organisations can switch AI processing off entirely for documents flagged as confidential. By default the publisher's staff sees only account data such as subscription, usage and error status, never document content; reading content requires the customer's explicit, temporary authorisation, which expires on its own, can be revoked, is logged and triggers an automatic email to administrators. The people described in these documents include council members, civil servants and citizens named in the files.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Documents are stored on Cloudflare R2 in an EU jurisdiction, with storage and processing kept inside the European Union. The application and its database run on OVH SAS infrastructure in France. Documents are encrypted with AES through Laravel's Crypt layer before they are uploaded, so the object storage only ever holds ciphertext, and transport is protected by TLS. Encrypted backups are taken periodically within the EU and checked every morning. AI processing is performed by OpenAI Ireland Ltd., which may transfer data to affiliated entities outside the EEA, including in the United States, under Chapter V GDPR safeguards. The sub-processor list is published in full: OVH SAS, Cloudflare R2, OpenAI Ireland Ltd., Resend, Namecheap Inc. (PrivateEmail) and Stripe. Fonts and scripts are served from the publisher's own European servers, with no external trackers. One caveat for anyone checking independently: the domain resolves to a Cloudflare anycast address registered in the United States, which is a CDN edge and not the hosting location.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting ClerkAI.
- The dating does not add up. The About page shows 2024 as the founding year, while the Dutch trade register records a registration on 1 January 2026 and the clerkai.nl domain was only registered on 25 November 2025, with no Internet Archive capture of the site at all. The register date itself comes from an aggregator relaying the KVK, not from the register directly, since the KVK reserves that date for a paid extract.
- ClerkAI is a trade name, not a company. The legal entity is Webflow Services, a Dutch eenmanszaak (sole proprietorship) registered under KVK number 99492067, which also trades as Clippy.rip, CryoKeys.com and Morgenklaar.nl. It has no connection whatsoever with Webflow, Inc., the American website builder, nor with Clerk (clerk.com), the authentication service.
- There is no independent certification: no ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no NEN 7510. The accessibility statement says plainly that no formal, independent audit has taken place yet, and the certifications sometimes invoked belong to the sub-processors (Cloudflare R2, OVH, OpenAI, Stripe), not to the publisher. The GDPR compliance claim rests on the publisher's own word.
- The dashboard shown on the homepage is a mock-up: the account is a demo user, the documents are fictional and the email addresses end in @example.org. None of it is evidence of real usage, and no municipal customer is actually named anywhere on the site.
- No postal address is published anywhere on the site; the register places the establishment in Wormerveer, in the municipality of Zaanstad. Contact runs through email only, with a stated response time of one working day.
- The entire AI layer rests on a single sub-processor, OpenAI Ireland Ltd., which may transfer data to affiliated entities outside the EEA, including in the United States, under Chapter V safeguards. The robots.txt Content-Signals (ai-train=no, GPTBot and ClaudeBot blocked) protect the website's own content, not your uploaded documents.
- Treat the output as a first pass, not a verdict. Liability is capped at three months of fees up to a maximum of 5,000 EUR, and the publisher is explicit that the final judgement remains with you. The page references exist precisely so that summaries and action points can be checked against the source rather than trusted blind, and a reader who stops opening the original document will slowly lose the feel for the file that the job actually requires.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. Nothing is installed and no IT department is required: you create an account, invite colleagues by email from the admin portal and start dragging PDFs into the browser, with the analysis beginning straight away. Organisation plans can add Google single sign-on, while Microsoft Entra ID is configured on request. The one step left to each individual user is enabling multi-factor authentication with a passkey or a TOTP app. Anyone comfortable with an ordinary web application will be productive within minutes.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind ClerkAI
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement ClerkAI.
Frequently asked questions
Are my documents safe on ClerkAI?
Which file formats does ClerkAI accept?
Are my documents used to train AI models?
Can I try ClerkAI for free?
Can we roll it out across an entire municipality?
Does ClerkAI support Microsoft single sign-on?
What happens to my data if I cancel?
Is a data processing agreement available?
How is this different from Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini?
Who at ClerkAI can read my documents?
Should you pick ClerkAI?
ClerkAI is a deliberately narrow tool, and that is its strength. It does not try to be a general assistant: it reads council documents in PDF form and returns summaries, page-referenced action points, speaking notes and thematic tags into a shared archive that a clerk's office, a group of council members and a policy team can all work from. For anyone who has spent an evening ploughing through a meeting pack, the proposition is easy to grasp.
What is striking is how much of the pitch is about compliance rather than features. EU storage, encryption before upload, a published data processing agreement, a fully named sub-processor chain, an unconditional promise not to train models on customer documents, and a support access model requiring the customer's explicit, temporary and logged authorisation: this is a product shaped to survive a public procurement questionnaire.
That is also where the reservations sit. The publisher is not a company but Webflow Services, a Dutch sole proprietorship trading under four different names, with no postal address on the site. There is no independent certification, and the accessibility statement admits as much about its own audit. The founding year shown on the site does not line up with the register or with the age of the domain. None of this makes the product bad, but a municipality signing a supplier contract will want answers first.
The good news is that finding out costs nothing and commits nothing. There is a permanent free plan without a card, and municipalities can run the full Gemeente Basic package for fourteen days. That is the sensible way to judge whether the summaries are good enough for the documents you actually deal with, and to keep in mind what the publisher says itself: the final judgement stays with you.
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