PortoDoc: facts at a glance – provider, service, prices, limits

Provider

What PortoDoc does

• You get a delivery address in Ahrensburg near Hamburg for letter post; the address includes your personal PD number.
• Incoming letters are opened, digitised and made available in your customer account.
• We scan your mail and you get a notification; you then find the letter as a PDF in your account.
• The English AI translation (German, English) is included in all three plans; AI summaries and deadline detection depend on your plan.
• AI results are labelled as such and are non-binding aids; they do not replace legal or tax advice.

Authorised recipient

• You can name PortoDoc to tax authorities as your authorised recipient. If your business has no residence, registered office or place of management in Germany, the EU or the EEA, the law requires an authorised recipient in Germany: as a marketplace seller with your application for tax registration (§ 22f(1) sentence 2 UStG), otherwise only when the tax office asks for one and sets a reasonable period (§ 123 AO).
• The Starter plan covers naming PortoDoc to one authority; Business and Enterprise cover any number of authorities.
• For this, you give a separate, hand-signed power of attorney; for a company, a person authorised to represent it signs.
• You name PortoDoc to the authority yourself, using the template PortoDoc provides.

What PortoDoc does not do

• The delivery address is not a business or registered-office address for your company.
• PortoDoc gives no legal or tax advice and is neither a law firm nor a tax adviser.
• PortoDoc is not a fiscal representative; it takes the authorised-recipient role only.
• An authorised recipient (Empfangsbevollmächtigter) receives the tax office's documents for you. It is not the authorised representative under the German Packaging Act (VerpackG) or the Electrical and Electronic Equipment Act (ElektroG); PortoDoc does not take on that role.
• PortoDoc makes no declarations, lodges no appeals and monitors no deadlines.
• You check your customer account regularly and keep track of deadlines yourself.

Prices and contract

• Each letter above the allowance costs €2.95.
• With annual payment, you pay for 10 months instead of 12.
• For businesses based outside Germany to which the service is not taxable in Germany, these are net prices without German VAT; outside the EU, this requires proof that you are a business.
• With monthly payment, the contract runs until further notice and can be cancelled at the end of each billing month; with annual payment, the term is twelve months.
• You can cancel in your customer account or in text form to support@portodoc.de.

Originals and data

• Original letters are kept for 90 days after digitisation and then destroyed in a data-protection-compliant way with a document shredder.
• On request, PortoDoc forwards originals to an address you name, for postage and a handling fee according to the price list.
• The application, database and scans are hosted by Hetzner Online GmbH in a data centre in Helsinki, Finland.
• The AI model runs on a computer in Germany; letter contents are not used to train AI models.