About us
Built by people who read the file, not just reformatted it.
BonaFile started because a chat export lies in ways that look completely ordinary — and the tools printing them were passing those lies straight into people's immigration cases.
Why it exists
It started with a number that was wrong.
Someone preparing an immigration petition printed five years of WhatsApp messages and noticed the printout claimed they had never once spoken by phone in 2021. They had spoken constantly. The file was not lying — WhatsApp simply did not write answered calls into conversations back then, and the tool doing the printing did not know that.
An officer reading that document would have seen a couple who never called each other. Nobody would have been able to explain why, because nobody would have known there was anything to explain.
That is the entire reason this exists. Not to make a chat look tidy, but to read it properly and say out loud where it misleads. Most of what the product knows was found by trying to break its own results, and every one of those findings is now a check that stops the run rather than a number nobody questions.
What we believe
Four rules we do not bend.
These are the decisions that shaped the product, including the ones that made it harder to build or cheaper to abandon.
We would rather not hold it
The safest way to protect a conversation is never to receive it. That decision came first, and everything else in the product was built around it — including the parts that made the engineering harder.
Say the smaller number
Where the data cannot support a firm figure, we state the floor and label it. A record that overstates is worth less than one that admits its limits, because the first can be attacked and the second cannot.
Show your working
Every line we print points back to where it came from in your own file. If you cannot check it, it is an assertion, not evidence.
Volunteer the bad news
If your record has a gap, we say so on the page rather than letting you discover it from an officer. Nobody has ever been helped by finding out late.
The decision underneath everything
We built it so we could not betray you.
Promises are worth what the company making them is worth on its worst day. So the product does not ask you for a promise. Your conversation is read on your own computer, and what we do hold we delete quickly — because a breach, a bad hire, a subpoena or an acquisition changes nothing about who can read your messages. Only you can.
Where we stop
The things we will not do.
A list like this is only worth reading if it costs the people who wrote it something. These do.
- We do not read your messages, and we have built the product so that we cannot.
- We do not train anything on your conversation.
- We do not sell, share or broker your data, and there is nothing to sell.
- We do not tell you your case is strong. We are not qualified to, and it would be a cruel thing to guess about.
- We do not add a number to the record that we cannot trace back to your file.
And the biggest one
We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. If your case is difficult, talk to a qualified immigration lawyer. A good record makes that conversation better; it does not replace it. Read the full note.
Get started
See what your own chat shows.
A few minutes, and deleted three days later by default.