If anyone is looking for a fully-commercial version, we use something like this — it is called Hubdoc and it is free with any Xero subscription.
I really really appreciate the work that went into paperless, but for us the business risk of self-hosting this is far too high because if we lose our docs we lose our tax proof.
Personally, I consider self-hosted services to potentially have a longer lifespan than relying on a commercial product. Unless a company has a robust escrow contingency, then there's always a possibility that they can go bust and you lose your data and service. Probably more of a concern is vendor lock-in, especially when they decide to change their service levels.
Paperless-ngx is a great example of how open source can work around the issue of lack of maintenance (quite a big problem with commercial services if they don't get much profit from them) as IIRC Paperless-NG was a fork from Paperless and now Paperless-NGX is a fork from Paperless-NG. Even if it becomes completely obsolete, I can choose to keep an instance running for as many decades as I wish.
This is true. I have yet to see an accounting web service go under this hard, though. I am thinking that Xero (and Hubdoc) will be around for decades at least, and probably outlast my own company.
I really really appreciate the work that went into paperless, but for us the business risk of self-hosting this is far too high because if we lose our docs we lose our tax proof.