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The FOIAXpress alternative built for cities, not federal agencies.

FOIAXpress (now OPEXUS) is the FOIA platform behind most of the federal government — with the federal-scale price tag, federal-style approval chains, and an AI Assist add-on layered on top. A city clerk's office does not need any of that. CivicRecordsOnline gives you the same core workflow — intake, deadlines, redaction, release, audit — for $99 to $499 per month, with automatic privacy scanning and bulk find-and-erase included in every plan.

Why local agencies switch from FOIAXpress

Federal-scale price for city-scale work FOIAXpress is built for federal departments processing tens of thousands of requests through formal review chains. Cities and towns pay enterprise pricing for tooling sized far above what their office actually needs.

AI Assist is a separate paid module OPEXUS sells its AI Assist redaction module on top of the base FOIAXpress contract. CivicRecordsOnline bundles automatic privacy scanning and bulk find-and-erase into every plan from $99/mo — no AI upsell, no separate redaction module.

Predictable, no machine-learning guesses AI Assist uses machine learning to find sensitive content; results can shift between releases and are harder to defend in audit. CivicRecordsOnline uses a pattern-based engine that gives the same answer every time and never trains on your records.

P-card friendly, no annual contract FedRAMP/StateRAMP-grade procurement involves contracts, statements of work, and a long approval path. Every CivicRecordsOnline tier is under $500/mo and stays inside department P-card limits. Monthly subscription. Cancel anytime.

Side by side

What you are evaluating	FOIAXpress (OPEXUS)	CivicRecordsOnline
Designed around	Federal departments, large state agencies, DOJ Annual FOIA Report generation.	Cities, towns, counties, and special districts where the clerk runs the records process.
Pricing	Quote-only. Federal-scale annual contracts.	Published. $99 / $199 / $299 / $499 per month.
Approval path	FedRAMP/StateRAMP procurement workflow.	Department P-card. No annual contract required.
Automatic privacy scanning	Sold as the AI Assist add-on module.	Included in every tier. Finds names, addresses, SSNs, phone numbers, license numbers, and more.
Bulk find-and-erase across documents	Inside the AI Assist and Electronic Document Review modules.	Included. Type a name once, erase across 500 pages.
Trains AI on your records?	AI Assist depends on machine-learning models.	No. Your records never train an outside AI model.
Free trial	Demo only.	14-day free trial of the full product. Same day for .gov agencies.
Implementation	Vendor-led federal-grade implementation.	Self-serve. Set up in an afternoon.
Bring your request history	Vendor migration project. Implementation fee.	Self-serve CSV importer reads FOIAXpress's export directly.

What you actually get in every plan

Tools OPEXUS sells as separate AI Assist and Electronic Document Review modules are all included in the $99/mo District plan and up.

Instant Privacy Scan Finds names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, license numbers, credit cards, and more automatically. You review each one before anything is released.

Find & Fix Everywhere Type a name, address, or phrase once and erase it across every page of a 500-page document in one pass.

Permanent Safety Lock When the release copy is published, your redactions are locked permanently. Your original file stays untouched in the audit trail.

Smart Medical Catching Flags complicated health terms, sensitive medical codes, dates of birth in context, and minor names that ordinary search tools miss.

Scanned-paper reading Reads text out of scanned PDFs and images so the privacy scan and bulk erase work on historical paper records too.

Draft review before anything goes out Every automatic redaction is a draft until staff approve it. Add an exemption code, add a note, then publish. Nothing is released silently.

Already on FOIAXpress? Bring your history with you.

The CivicRecordsOnline bulk importer recognizes FOIAXpress's request-export CSV format directly. Export your request log out of FOIAXpress, upload the file from Settings → Bulk Import, and your request history loads with the original dates, statuses, requester contact information, and source IDs preserved. The clerk does it self-serve — no vendor migration project, no professional services engagement, no implementation fee.

The importer also reads exports from NextRequest, GovQA, JustFOIA, and MyGovHub, plus a generic CSV format if your current system is something else. Note: the importer covers request history metadata. Moving the actual document files and attachments from your old system is on you.

For your IT director and city attorney

The redaction workflow is a deterministic pattern-matching engine, not a generative AI model. Same input, same output, every time — defensible in audit and easy to explain to a judge. Agency records are never sent to train external models. All data is stored on Microsoft Azure in US data centers, encrypted AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, with role-based access control and an immutable audit trail of every action.

CivicRecordsOnline is not FedRAMP, StateRAMP, CJIS, or HIPAA authorized — it focuses on standard municipal records (zoning, permits, council correspondence, public crime statistics, contracts, public works) and passes the savings from skipping that compliance overhead back to the city as the monthly price. See the full IT & security overview →

Who CivicRecordsOnline is not built for

We are honest about scope. CivicRecordsOnline is not the right tool if any of the following describe your office:

You are a federal department or executive-branch agency required to generate the DOJ Annual FOIA Report or coordinate Inspector General investigations.
Your procurement requires FedRAMP or StateRAMP authorization. CivicRecordsOnline is not authorized under either framework.
You handle CJIS criminal justice records or HIPAA-covered medical records. CivicRecordsOnline is intentionally out of those compliance scopes — that is how we keep the price under $500/mo.

Use the same lens against the rest of the market.

See the price. Start the trial. Skip federal-scale procurement.

Join the waitlist and we will email the day .gov trials open. From $99/mo. P-card friendly. No annual contract required.