Permanently remove anything sensitive.

Yes — that is the difference between redaction and a black rectangle. Drawing a filled shape over text in most PDF editors leaves the characters in the file, where anyone can select, copy or extract them. PDFMacro marks regions first, lets you review every match, and burns the redactions during export so the underlying content is gone from the exported copy. The original file you opened is never modified.

It can. Pattern detection finds structured data such as Social Security numbers, phone numbers and email addresses, and an on-device AI model can additionally flag names and other entities. Everything it finds is presented for your review before anything is applied — detection proposes, you decide. Automatic detection and bulk pattern redaction are Pro features; marking and burning by hand is free.

No. The file is opened, processed and saved back by code running in this browser tab — there is no upload endpoint on our servers to send it to. You can watch the Network panel in your browser's developer tools while you work and confirm nothing carrying the document leaves the page.

Smart Redact is free with a free account: up to 3 downloads a day, and a small PDFMacro line on each page of a saved PDF. Pro removes both. There are no page or file-size caps on either plan.

With Pro, yes. Once the page has loaded, every tool keeps working with the network disconnected, because the processing never depended on a server round-trip; OCR's language packs need one download the first time. A free account needs a connection to save, for its daily count. AI features need your AI: your provider online, or your local model running.