Your guide to settle in Canada — without stress, without mistakes.
Erable is an AI-powered web app that helps French-speaking newcomers navigate the administrative steps of settling in Canada: getting a SIN, opening a bank account, applying for OHIP, finding childcare, filing their first tax return, and a dozen other things that usually take weeks to figure out alone.
The first phase focuses on Ottawa, Ontario. More provinces and cities will follow.
A French version of this README is available: README.fr.md.
In development. Public launch planned ~12 weeks from kickoff.
This repository is public from day one. The codebase is the product — there is no closed-source enterprise edition, no premium-only modules hidden away. The business model relies on transparent affiliate partnerships, one-shot AI services, and a Premium subscription, all of which are documented openly.
The author is himself a French-speaking newcomer arriving in Ottawa. Every pain point Erable addresses is a pain point he is currently experiencing or about to experience.
Existing resources are either outdated (Settlement.org), English-only (WelcomeAide, Moving2Canada), bank-biased (RBC's Arrive app), or expensive (RCIC consultants at $500–$1,500). Erable aims to fill the gap with modern UX, AI assistance, and a francophone-first approach, while staying strictly within the legal scope of public information (no immigration advice — that is reserved for licensed RCICs).
Backend — Python 3.13, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy 2.0 async, PostgreSQL 16 with pgvector, Redis 7, ARQ for background workers, Pydantic v2.
Frontend — Next.js 14 (App Router), TypeScript strict, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, next-intl for FR/EN i18n, PWA.
AI — Provider-agnostic LLM abstraction supporting Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Mistral, and local Ollama. BGE-M3 embeddings for multilingual RAG. Tesseract for privacy-first local OCR; Claude Vision only as an opt-in fallback.
Infrastructure — Docker, Hetzner VPS with Coolify for production,
Cloudflare for edge, GitHub Actions for CI/CD. AWS Terraform templates
are kept in infrastructure/aws/ as a reference, not as the production
target.
Observability — structlog, OpenTelemetry, Sentry, Grafana Cloud.
Architecture decisions are tracked in docs/adr/.
Privacy is not a feature, it is a position. Documents uploaded for analysis are processed in memory and never persisted to disk or database. The OCR pipeline runs locally with Tesseract by default; sending a document to Claude Vision requires an explicit per-document consent. Affiliate tracking applies to authenticated users only — no anonymous fingerprinting, no third-party cookies.
The full privacy policy lives in PRIVACY.md and is written in plain language, not legalese.
Erable provides general information based on official Canadian public sources. Erable is not an immigration, legal, or tax advisory service. For personalized advice, consult a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant (RCIC) or a lawyer admitted to the bar of the relevant province.
This disclaimer is enforced in the product itself: the AI is tested to refuse questions that fall outside the scope of public information, and these tests are part of the CI pipeline.
The bootstrap is in progress. Detailed setup instructions will land with the first runnable version of the stack. For now, this section documents the intended developer experience.
Prerequisites
- Docker 25+ and Docker Compose v2
- Node.js 20+ and pnpm 9+
- Python 3.13+ and uv
- GNU Make
- A Linux or macOS host (Fedora 44 is the reference development environment)
Setup
git clone git@github.com:mdsiha/erable.git
cd erable
cp .env.example .env # then fill in local secrets
make dev # starts postgres, redis, backend, frontendA Makefile at the repository root will be the single entry point
for common tasks (make dev, make test, make lint, make migrate).
erable/
├── backend/ FastAPI service + ARQ workers
├── frontend/ Next.js application
├── infrastructure/ Coolify configs (prod) and AWS Terraform (reference)
├── docs/ Architecture, ADRs, runbooks
└── .github/ CI workflows, issue and PR templates
The project is in heavy active development by a single author during the first 10–12 weeks. External contributions are welcome but may take some time to review until the MVP is shipped.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution workflow, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for community expectations.
To report a security issue, please follow SECURITY.md.
A high-level roadmap is maintained in ROADMAP.md. Detailed work happens through GitHub Issues and Projects.
MIT © 2026 Michael Das
General inquiries: hello@erable.app
For everything else, GitHub Issues are the preferred channel.