Public records · FOIA · Open records
The records took two hours.
The response took ten months.
Finding the records was never the hard part. The hard part is reading every page, deciding what comes out, being able to name the exemption a year later, and doing all of it with the staff you actually have.
A city told a requester the work would take 2 hours and 15 minutes, and that the records would arrive in 8 to 10 months.
City of Grand Rapids, in litigation over FOIA delay. Michigan Court of Appeals, December 2025.No card. Run your worst scanned file through it yourself, or bring it to the call and we will.
What it does
It reads the set, then it stops.
Four steps, in the order your response actually happens.
01
Reads everything
Scans, phone photos, sideways faxes, email with the attachments split into their own records, video and audio held with checksums. OCR with an escalation path for handwriting.
02
Flags with a reason
Personal information and exempt content, marked across the whole set rather than one file at a time, each mark carrying the exemption that applies to it.
03
Waits for a person
Nothing is redacted automatically. Your reviewer approves or rejects each mark and can draw a box on anything detection missed. Release refuses to run while anything is undecided.
04
Releases defensibly
The redaction is burned into the released page, not drawn over it, so text cannot be copied back out. The release carries who decided what and when.
The part most tools get wrong
Automatic redaction moves the work, it does not remove it
A tool that redacts on its own and then asks you to check its work has not saved anyone anything. You still read every page, and now you are also second-guessing a machine.
So detection here stops at a flag. The decision is a person's, on the record, by name.
A black rectangle is not a redaction
A box drawn over live text in a PDF is a box drawn over live text. Select the page, paste it somewhere, and the name you covered is still there. That has ended careers and produced settlements.
Released copies here are re-rendered with the content removed from the file, and the output is checked before it leaves.
When a denial is challenged a year from now, the question is not whether the software was clever. It is who decided, what they decided, and when. That record is the product.
Where it fits
It does not replace how you track requests.
Intake, routing, the clock and the requester correspondence stay exactly where they are. RecordBeacon does the part between finding the records and being able to release them.
You already have a request platform
Keep it. Records come out of it, get reviewed here, and the released set goes back. Nobody changes how requests come in, and nobody has to retrain a department.
You run FOIA out of a mailbox and Acrobat
Most townships, villages and small districts do, because a platform priced for a city makes no sense at fifteen requests a year. This is the piece that actually costs you hours.
- Duplicates are caught across the whole response, so nobody reads the same page twice.
- Related documents are grouped, so a file and its attachments stay together.
- Every release is verified: the output is read back to confirm redacted content is gone.
- Read-only seats are free and unlimited, so anyone in the organisation can see the work without paying for a seat they will not use.
Getting started
See it work before anyone talks about contracts.
The first fifteen documents are free, with no card. A clerk can run an actual response through it and see what comes back, before involving procurement, legal, or anyone else.
An agency that needs its own deployment is a different conversation. Single-tenant, hosted for you or running inside your own cloud account, with a security review, your retention rules, and support through your procurement process. We respond to RFPs and we have written the security and cloud attachments before.
Every deployment is scoped to the work. Start with a conversation.
Free, no account
The fee calculator, while you are here.
Michigan FOIA fees are formula-driven under MCL 15.234, and most clerks are computing them in a spreadsheet someone downloaded from another city's website. This builds the detailed itemization: labor in 15-minute increments rounded down, fringe, contracted redaction against the statutory cap, copying, the late-response reduction and the deposit you are allowed to require.
Free, no signup, and it runs entirely in your browser. Print it or paste it into your response letter.
Security
Where the records actually live.
Public agencies ask this first, and they should. The controls, without the marketing.
- United States regions only. Records do not leave them.
- Zero data retention with the model provider. Your documents are never used to train anything, by us or by anyone else.
- Role-based access and a named audit trail, which is the same record that makes a release defensible a year later.
- Encryption in transit and at rest.
- Single-tenant deployment, hosted for you or running inside your own cloud account, when your security review calls for it.
- We answer security reviews directly. Questionnaires, architecture, data flow, retention and subprocessors, in writing, from the person who built it.
Questions agencies actually ask
Does it replace our records request system?
No. Intake, routing and the deadline clock stay wherever they are today, whether that is a request platform or a shared mailbox. RecordBeacon does the part between finding the records and being able to release them.
Does it redact records automatically?
No. Detection flags what it finds and stops. A reviewer approves or rejects every mark, and the release step refuses to run while anything is undecided. A tool that redacts on its own and then asks you to check its work has not saved anyone anything.
What happens when detection misses something?
Your reviewer draws a box on it. Reviewer-drawn marks carry the same audit record as detected ones, so a manual catch is not a second-class citizen in the log.
How do agencies buy this?
Two ways. A clerk can run the first fifteen documents free, with no card, and see it work on a real response before involving anyone. An agency that needs its own single-tenant deployment, a security review and support through procurement is a scoped engagement. We respond to RFPs.
Can we try it before we buy it?
The first 15 documents are free with no card. For a real evaluation, book a walkthrough and bring an actual response set rather than a test file. That is the only way anyone learns whether this works on your records.
Bring your worst scan.
The phone photo, the sideways fax, the one your staff complains about most. Run fifteen documents through it yourself with no card and no call, or book twenty minutes and we will run them with you. Either way you find out on your own records, not a prepared demo.