DocuChat
DocuChat turns PDFs, websites, Drive folders and YouTube videos into AI chatbots that answer with cited sources. Run by a UK company on EU-hosted infrastructure, it ships as a shared link or an embedded widget.
What is DocuChat?
DocuChat is a hosted platform for building AI chatbots that answer strictly from content you supply, using retrieval augmented generation. It is published by DocuChat AI Limited, a company registered in the United Kingdom, and has been online since at least February 2023; version 2 left beta in September 2023 and the changelog reaches v3.14.0 in May 2026.
The retrieval pipeline is documented in eight steps. Files are parsed with OCR for image-only PDFs, reading-order awareness on multi-column layouts and structured extraction of tables from PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX. Documents are then split into chunks that keep their heading context, embedded, and stored in a vector database. Every question runs through both semantic and keyword search, a reranking model reorders the candidates, and the answer is generated from the top passages with citations preserved. Hybrid search, reranking and structure-aware chunking are on by default on any new chatbot, so answer quality does not depend on tuning.
Sources go well beyond uploads: text files, audio and video under 25 MB, website URLs with a crawler that discovers linked pages and can filter out login screens and legal notices, YouTube videos that carry English captions, and Google Drive folders resynchronised every hour. Answers are returned in the language of the question, across more than eighty languages.
Twelve models are offered, including Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.2, Mistral Large 2 and Llama 4 Scout. The Claude and Mistral models are hosted in the EU; OpenAI models run in the United States unless an Enterprise customer connects Azure OpenAI. End-to-end EU data residency is the product's central argument: storage and inference both happen on AWS servers in Frankfurt, and an organisation toggle can forbid any non-EU model outright.
Chatbots are shared by private link or embedded on a site as an inline interface or a floating widget, customised without code down to custom CSS, and white-labelled on the Pro plan. Teams get roles, permissions and shared seats; analytics cover questions, answers, resolution and chat sessions, with JSON or CSV export.
What it does
- Build a chatbot trained on your own documents, websites, YouTube videos and Google Drive folders
- Answer questions with citations pointing to the exact document, page and passage
- Read difficult files: scanned PDFs through OCR, multi-column layouts, tables in PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX
- Keep storage and model inference inside the European Union, and enforce it organisation-wide
- Deploy through a private share link, an embedded chat interface or a floating widget
- Pick the answering model among twelve, from Claude Opus 4.7 to GPT-4o mini
- Track questions, answers and resolution in the analytics module, with Google Tag Manager support
When to use DocuChat / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if DocuChat is the right fit.
When to use DocuChat
- Support teams sitting on a written help centre and drowning in repeat tickets they would rather deflect
- GDPR-sensitive organisations that need storage and model inference to stay inside the European Union
- HR, IT and operations teams whose policies and SOPs are scattered across PDFs, wikis and Drive folders
- Software vendors who want a question-and-answer layer on top of their technical documentation
- Small businesses, agencies and solo builders: a permanent free tier, then a paid entry point in the low tens of dollars
When not to use DocuChat
- Developers who need programmatic access: the REST API is announced as roadmap and is not published
- Teams that want the assistant to live in Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp or Messenger, none of which are supported
- Anyone expecting a mobile app, since the product is web-only
- Buyers looking for an action-taking agent, because DocuChat answers from documents and does not execute business tasks
- Procurement teams that require the vendor's own SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certificate rather than its cloud provider's
How to use DocuChat
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account from the free plan, which requires no credit card
- Import your resources: upload documents, paste website URLs, add YouTube links or connect Google Drive
- For a website, enable the option that discovers every linked page, then keep or drop pages from the list
- Wait for indexing, which takes seconds for a document under 100 pages and rarely more than a minute
- Choose the answering model, keeping to EU-hosted models if data residency matters to you
- Set the chatbot's behaviour: custom instructions, answer length, welcome message and suggested questions
- Customise the appearance, from colours and branding to custom CSS, without writing application code
- Open Document insights to check how a file was parsed, chunked and indexed before users hit a gap
- Deploy with a private share link, or paste the embed code as an inline interface or a floating widget
- Monitor questions, answers and resolution in analytics, and export the data as JSON or CSV
Pros & Cons
Pros
- EU data residency covers inference as well as storage, and can be enforced technically rather than merely promised
- The nine subprocessors are listed by name, country and role without having to ask
- A dedicated clause rules out training on customer content, and extends the commitment to the model providers
- Citations point to the document, page and exact passage, which makes an answer checkable rather than plausible
- Retrieval quality is treated as a factory default instead of an expert setting
- Difficult documents are handled properly: OCR, multi-column reading order and table extraction
- Pricing is low and legible for this segment, with a permanent free plan and a customer-set spending cap on overages
Cons
- No public HTTP API: the publisher states a REST API is on the roadmap and deliberately unpublished
- No Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp or Messenger integration, and no mobile application
- No security certification of the publisher's own; the SOC 2 mention on the homepage refers to AWS
- The DPA and the full subprocessor list are available on request only, not as a direct download
- OpenAI models stay hosted in the United States outside the Enterprise plan, which narrows the EU argument by model
- AI Credit consumption is hard to forecast, from around 100 credits per question on fast models to 1,800 or more on frontier ones
- Terms and Privacy Notice are both dated 14 December 2023 and have not been revised since the pricing model changed in May 2026
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available without a credit card, covering one chatbot, 7,500 AI Credits per month and 250 pages of source documents. The lowest paid entry point is the Essential plan at USD 14 per month on annual billing, or USD 17 per month when billed monthly. The Pro plan follows at USD 31 per month annually, or USD 37 monthly, and the Enterprise plan is quoted on request. A 14-day money-back guarantee applies from the first purchase.
- Free — USD 0
- Essential — USD 14/month billed annually
- USD 17/month billed monthly
- Pro — USD 31/month billed annually
- USD 37/month billed monthly
- Enterprise — custom quote
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how DocuChat handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR compliance is claimed explicitly, alongside CCPA and PIPEDA, and it is backed by more than a badge. The Privacy Notice of 14 December 2023 maps each processing purpose to an Article 6 legal basis, details EEA, UK and Swiss rights, and names a single contact, hi@docuchat.io. The Trust Center lists nine subprocessors with their country and role, and offers a DPA on request. Storage and model inference both sit on AWS servers in Frankfurt, and an organisation-level toggle can block any model hosted outside the European Union. Two gaps are worth noting: no Article 27 EU representative is designated, although the publisher is established in the United Kingdom, and no data protection officer is named.
Who owns the data?
Under the Terms of Service you keep the intellectual property rights to everything you upload, and the publisher states it claims no ownership of your content. You do, however, grant DocuChat AI Limited a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide licence to use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly display, translate and create derivative works from that content, exercised in line with your privacy preferences and the Privacy Notice. The licence ends when you delete the content or the account, and the homepage states that deleted material is permanently removed from the servers. If the service were discontinued, the terms promise one month's notice and an export route.
Reuse rights
Reuse of your own material is unrestricted: you upload documents, websites, YouTube videos or Drive folders, keep ownership of them, and can export analytics data as JSON or CSV or delete everything without asking permission. The constraint runs the other way, on the publisher: the Privacy Notice contains a dedicated clause stating that no file, website, Drive folder, question or answer is ever used to develop, improve or train generalised AI or ML models, neither by DocuChat nor by its model providers, and that Google Workspace APIs are excluded too. Personal data is processed for sign-up, service delivery, support, analytics, maintenance, security, compliance and legal claims, under contract performance, legitimate interests or legal obligation. Recipients are limited to technical providers, payment providers, professional advisers and authorities, with Standard Contractual Clauses covering transfers outside the European Union.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Storage and processing, including model inference, take place on AWS servers in Frankfurt, Germany. The infrastructure subprocessor is AWS Europe (Luxembourg), with data held in Frankfurt. Among the model providers, Mistral is French and the Claude models are EU-hosted, while Cohere and OpenAI are American and covered by Standard Contractual Clauses. PostHog for product analytics and Sentry for observability are US companies whose data is hosted in the EU; Brevo for email and Crisp for support chat are French. An organisation-level setting, Enforce data residency in the EU, prevents administrators from selecting any model hosted outside the European Union and disables features that would move data out of the region, reporting non-compliant chatbots in a CSV file. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, key management is centralised, and backups are automated and encrypted.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting DocuChat.
- The SOC 2 reference on the homepage describes AWS's compliance programmes, not an audit of DocuChat, which publishes no certification or audit report of its own
- The publisher calls itself EU-based and even an EU company based in United Kingdom, while DocuChat AI Limited is registered in the UK and the contract is governed by the laws of England and Wales; the hosting is genuinely European, the corporate establishment is not
- No Article 27 representative is designated, which is what one would expect of a controller established outside the European Union handling EU residents' data
- The Terms and the Privacy Notice are both dated 14 December 2023 and were not revised when the product moved to AI Credits and launched a free tier in May 2026
- The content licence granted in the Terms is broad, being transferable, sublicensable, worldwide and covering derivative works, even though it is bounded by the Privacy Notice and revoked by deletion
- The Terms disclaim any warranty on the factual accuracy or truthfulness of chatbot answers, so a cited answer still needs a human check before it drives a decision
- The headline figures of 95% answer accuracy, 70% less time on question-answering and over 90% self-served questions come with no published methodology, and the testimonials are collected through a third-party widget under first names or job titles
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low. The publisher advertises a five-minute setup with no credit card, and no code is needed to create, customise or deploy a chatbot. Connecting Google Drive is an OAuth authorisation, and publishing on a website means pasting an embed snippet for either an inline interface or a floating widget. Only three optional tasks call for technical help: custom CSS, Google Tag Manager configuration, and injecting user context through the JavaScript postMessage interface, which needs a front-end developer. Nothing is installed and no server has to be administered.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind DocuChat
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement DocuChat.
Frequently asked questions
What does the chatbot base its answers on?
Which file formats and sources can I use?
Which AI models are available?
Is my content used to train AI models?
Where is my data hosted?
Is there an API?
How much does it cost to start?
What happens when my AI Credits run out?
Can I remove the DocuChat branding?
Is a Data Processing Agreement available?
Should you pick DocuChat?
DocuChat is a real, documented product rather than a promise: three years of dated changelog entries, a standalone documentation site, a public four-tier price list and a working demo chatbot on the homepage. Its positioning is unusually clear for this crowded segment. Where most document-chatbot vendors mention GDPR in passing, DocuChat builds its argument on data sovereignty and then supports it with things that can be checked, a named subprocessor list, a Frankfurt hosting commitment covering inference as well as storage, and an organisation-level switch that actually blocks non-EU models. Retrieval quality is handled the same way: hybrid search, reranking and structure-aware chunking arrive switched on, so a good answer does not depend on knowing which knob to turn. Pricing stays legible and low, with a permanent free plan and a spending cap the customer sets. The reservations are real too, and mostly concern reach and paperwork rather than the core product. There is no public API, no messaging-platform integration and no mobile app, so DocuChat fits teams who want a chatbot on a website, not developers wiring it into a stack. The publisher holds no security certification of its own, and the SOC 2 badge on the homepage belongs to AWS. The legal documents date from December 2023 and were not revised when the pricing model changed in May 2026. Finally, a company registered in the United Kingdom and governed by English law describes itself as EU-based; the hosting claim holds, the corporate one deserves a second reading. For an organisation whose priority is answering questions from its own documents while keeping that data in Europe, DocuChat is a serious and reasonably priced candidate that should be assessed on its free plan first.
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