Everything you need to know about MyFOIA.ai. Can't find your answer? Contact us →
MyFOIA.ai is an AI-powered platform that helps individuals, journalists, researchers, and organizations file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act (PA) requests with U.S. federal agencies. We handle the drafting, mailing, follow-up, and escalation — so you can focus on the story or information you're after.
No. MyFOIA.ai is designed for anyone. You describe what records you're looking for in plain English, and our AI handles the technical drafting. That said, MyFOIA.ai is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. For complex litigation or denial appeals that involve legal strategy, our Attorney Referral Network can connect you with FOIA-specialized counsel.
We support 100+ U.S. federal agencies indexed in our Agency Explorer, including all cabinet-level departments, major independent agencies, and military components. State and local agencies are not currently supported — FOIA laws vary significantly at the state level and we don't yet have the agency-specific data to support them reliably.
Federal law requires agencies to respond within 20 business days of receiving your request. In practice, many agencies take much longer — backlogs of months or even years are common at high-volume offices like the FBI or State Department. MyFOIA.ai tracks your statutory deadline and automatically sends follow-up letters when agencies miss it.
Yes — the Free plan lets you draft and track unlimited self-managed FOIA requests at no cost, forever. AI Managed Mode (where we handle mailing, monitoring, and follow-up on your behalf) is a paid feature available on Standard and above. See our pricing page for full details.
When you activate AI Managed Mode for a request, MyFOIA.ai takes over the full lifecycle:
You receive notifications at each stage and can override or intervene at any time.
Most federal agencies require or strongly prefer FOIA requests to be submitted by mail or through their official online portals. Certified USPS mail creates a legally defensible paper trail — the return receipt proves the agency received your request, which is important if you later need to argue the 20-day clock started on a specific date. We mail certified because it matters legally, not just logistically.
Each AI Managed Mode request is assigned a unique @veraxmail.com address. This is the "return address" for email correspondence — when agencies email a response, it goes to this address and MyFOIA.ai processes it automatically. Your personal email is never exposed to the agency. You can see all received correspondence in your request dashboard.
Each AI Managed Mode activation covers certified USPS mailing for both the initial letter ($6.08) and one appeal mailing ($6.08) if needed — that's $12.16 in real postage, bundled into your plan so you never have to think about it. If your request doesn't require an appeal, the unused postage simply isn't spent. There are no hidden per-letter charges.
Yes. If you've already mailed your own letter, you can upload the USPS tracking number to your request and activate Managed Mode. We'll pick up monitoring from that point — watching for agency responses and handling follow-ups automatically. The initial mailing postage won't be consumed since you already sent it.
A managed activation is when you turn on AI Managed Mode for a specific FOIA request. Your plan sets how many new activations you can make per billing cycle. Existing managed requests that are already active do not count against the monthly limit — only newly activated ones do.
Yes. You can cancel from your account settings at any time. Your subscription remains active until the end of the current billing period — we don't prorate or refund partial months. After cancellation, your account reverts to the Free plan. Active managed requests will continue to be monitored until the end of your paid period, then pause.
No. Managed activations reset each billing cycle and unused ones do not roll over. This is consistent with how most subscription plans work and keeps our infrastructure costs predictable.
We accept all major credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover) via Stripe. We do not store your card details — all payment data is handled securely by Stripe.
Yes. See our full Refund Policy for details. In general, we offer refunds within 7 days of a charge if no managed activations have been used in that billing period.
Only you can see your requests in your dashboard. MyFOIA.ai staff may access request data for support purposes or to investigate platform issues, but we do not sell, share, or publish your request content. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
No. We do not use your personal FOIA request content to train AI models without your explicit consent. AI prompts are logged for debugging and quality improvement purposes, but are not used in model training pipelines. See Section 5 of our Privacy Policy for the full AI data handling policy.
Yes. All data is encrypted in transit via TLS 1.3 and at rest on our AWS infrastructure. Documents stored in S3 use server-side encryption. Database connections use SSL. We follow AWS security best practices throughout our infrastructure.
Yes. You can request account deletion from your profile settings or by contacting us at hello@myfoia.ai. We will delete your personal data within 30 days, subject to any legal retention requirements. See our Privacy Policy for what data may be retained after deletion.
Under FOIA, agencies must respond within 20 business days. If they don't, you have several options: send a follow-up letter (MyFOIA.ai does this automatically in Managed Mode), file an administrative appeal for "constructive denial," or refer the matter to OGIS (the FOIA ombudsman) for mediation. MyFOIA.ai handles all of these steps automatically in Managed Mode.
Yes. The Privacy Act of 1974 gives U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the right to access records about themselves held by federal agencies. MyFOIA.ai supports Privacy Act (PA) requests in addition to FOIA requests. PA requests sometimes yield more complete records about yourself than a FOIA request would. You can file a combined FOIA/PA request, which is often the most effective approach.
Agencies sometimes respond with a "no records" determination. This may be accurate, or it may reflect an overly narrow interpretation of your request. You can appeal a no-records response — MyFOIA.ai can draft an appeal arguing for a broader search or challenging the adequacy of the agency's search methodology.
Federal agencies can charge fees for search, duplication, and review — but many requests qualify for a full fee waiver. Journalists, researchers, educational institutions, and non-commercial requesters often qualify. MyFOIA.ai includes a fee waiver credential builder that helps you document your eligibility as part of your request letter.
If an agency denies your request (in full or in part), claims it can't find records, or takes too long to respond, you can file an administrative appeal. This is an internal review by a senior agency official. You generally have 90 days from the denial to file. An appeal is a required step before you can sue in federal court. MyFOIA.ai drafts these automatically in Managed Mode.
The Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) is the federal FOIA ombudsman — an independent office that mediates disputes between requesters and agencies. Mediation is free, voluntary, and non-binding, but it often produces results where direct appeals have failed. MyFOIA.ai can prepare OGIS referral letters in Managed Mode once your appeal options are exhausted.
When administrative options are exhausted, you may have the right to sue the agency in federal district court. MyFOIA.ai's Attorney Referral Network (available on Professional and Enterprise plans) can connect you with FOIA-specialized attorneys who handle these cases. Many FOIA attorneys work on contingency for strong cases.
MyFOIA.ai uses xAI's Grok model for letter drafting, document analysis, and strategic recommendations. We've built proprietary FOIA-specific training data and agency rules packages on top of the base model to produce legally compliant, agency-specific output.
You can upload PDF, Word (.docx), and common image formats (JPG, PNG). Documents are run through OCR to extract text for AI analysis. There is a 50MB per-file limit. Storage limits vary by plan — 100MB on Free, up to 100GB on Enterprise.
Not yet. MyFOIA.ai is fully responsive and works well on mobile browsers. A native mobile app is on our roadmap.
Please use our Support page to submit a ticket. Include as much detail as possible — browser, operating system, steps to reproduce, and any error messages you saw. We typically respond within one business day.