What is cDox? A look at the Canadian, privacy-first document and spreadsheet platform: features, pricing, data sovereignty model, and who it is built for.
What sets cDox apart from mainstream productivity suites like Google Docs or Microsoft 365 is not a novel editing feature but a fundamentally different stance on where and under what legal jurisdiction user data lives, and what it can be used for. Rather than hosting documents in a large multinational cloud provider's data centers subject to that provider's terms of service and jurisdiction, cDox currently stores all content on independent bare-metal servers physically located in Montreal, Quebec, placing user data explicitly under Canadian and Quebec law. The company has publicly committed that user content is never used to train AI models and is never extracted or mined for any secondary commercial purpose, a direct response to growing concern among writers, journalists, researchers, and privacy-conscious professionals about how their work might otherwise be used by large AI-focused technology companies.
Beyond its current Montreal hosting, cDox has stated plans to expand its infrastructure to additional countries, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Australia, through 2027, with the long-term goal of letting users actively choose which country's servers and legal framework their documents are stored under. This kind of user-selectable data residency is uncommon even among enterprise-grade productivity tools, and reflects cDox's positioning toward users and organizations for whom jurisdictional control over sensitive documents is a genuine requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
Functionally, cDox provides the two document types most users need day to day: pages for word-processing style long-form writing, and sheets for spreadsheet-style structured data, both with real-time collaborative editing via email-based invitations. Documents auto-save continuously, can be published with one click to a shareable public link, and can be exported into Markdown, PDF, Word, or CSV formats so users are never locked into a proprietary file format. Additional touches like dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, threaded comments, and REST API access round out the feature set for both casual writers and more technical users who want to integrate cDox into their own workflows.
Given its privacy-first and data-sovereignty positioning, cDox's stated target users skew toward professions where confidentiality and control over content genuinely matter: writers and journalists concerned about source protection or having their unpublished drafts feed AI training data, researchers and academics handling sensitive study material, therapists and healthcare providers with client confidentiality obligations, and nonprofits and educators who prefer to avoid dependence on large technology platforms. For general-purpose office productivity without those specific privacy priorities, mainstream tools like Google Docs or Microsoft 365 will typically still offer a broader and more mature feature set; cDox's value proposition is specifically about trading some of that breadth for jurisdictional control and an explicit no-AI-training commitment.
cDox is a privacy-first document and spreadsheet collaboration platform, built by Canadian company BFH Labs Inc., positioned as an alternative to Google Docs and Microsoft 365 for users who want data sovereignty and a guarantee that their content is never used to train AI models.
Currently, all cDox data is hosted on independent bare-metal servers in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, under Canadian and Quebec law. The company plans to expand hosting to France, Germany, the UK, Switzerland, and Australia through 2027, eventually letting users choose their data's country of residence.
No. cDox explicitly states that user content is never used to train AI models and is never extracted or mined for any other purpose.
cDox offers a Free tier with 50MB of storage and up to 3 public links, and a Pro tier at $8/month or $70/year with 500MB of storage and unlimited public links.
cDox documents can be exported to Markdown, PDF, Microsoft Word, CSV, and plain text formats.
Yes. Users can invite collaborators by email and edit documents together in real time, with changes syncing live across all participants.
cDox targets users and organizations where data privacy and jurisdictional control matter most, including writers, journalists, researchers, developers, editors, therapists, healthcare providers, nonprofits, and educators.
cDox markets itself to healthcare providers and similar privacy-sensitive professions, but as an early-stage company it has limited publicly disclosed compliance certifications, so organizations in regulated industries should independently verify its security and compliance posture before adopting it for regulated data.