TachadoPDF
Free (5 documents/month, up to 3 pages)
TachadoPDF deletes the selected text from the PDF itself and clears the pixels inside the areas you mark. Then it reopens the file it just produced, searches it again, and releases nothing if any of it comes back. You get a verification report with the SHA-256 fingerprint of the file you deliver.
100% in your browser · the document is never uploaded to any server
What is detected automatically: email addresses in any document, plus Spanish identifiers — DNI, NIE, Spanish IBAN, social security number and cadastral reference. Detection of UK and US identifiers (National Insurance number, NHS number, Social Security number, sort codes, local phone formats) is not built yet. Everything else you redact by drawing over it, and the removal and the verification are exactly the same either way.
Redact your document
A black rectangle over a PDF doesn't remove anything. The words stay in the file and copy straight back out — that is how reporters read the passages Paul Manafort's lawyers had blacked out in a court filing on 8 January 2019, and why a corrected version was on the public docket the same day. It isn't a rare accident either: the UK's Information Commissioner's Office fined the Police Service of Northern Ireland £750,000 after a hidden worksheet in a spreadsheet released under freedom of information exposed all 9,483 of its officers and staff. The failure is silent. Nothing looks wrong until someone checks.
Redaction verification report
Built for people who redact as part of the job: solicitors and paralegals preparing filings and disclosure, public bodies answering freedom-of-information and subject access requests, HR and payroll teams sharing employee documents, and journalists publishing source material.
59 €one-time
Pro is a one-time payment of 59 € and is not a subscription: it does not renew and does not generate recurring charges. It adds unlimited documents, no page limit, batch processing of several files at once, and a verification report with no watermark.
Free mode redacts 5 documents a month, up to 3 pages each, with exactly the same real deletion as Pro.
Redact your document →No. The whole process happens inside your browser and the file is never transmitted. You can check this yourself: disconnect from the internet and the tool still redacts and downloads your document.
It is removed from the contents of the file, not hidden behind a rectangle. When it finishes, the tool reopens the PDF it produced and searches it again — if anything you redacted is still readable, it tells you and refuses to release the file.
Automatically: email addresses, and Spanish identifiers (DNI, NIE, Spanish IBAN, social security number, cadastral reference). It does not yet recognise UK or US identifiers such as National Insurance numbers, NHS numbers, Social Security numbers or local phone formats. Everything else — names, addresses, signatures, photographs, figures — you mark by dragging a box over it. What gets deleted, and what gets checked afterwards, is identical either way.
Automatic detection covers set formats and will not catch everything. That is why you can redact any area by hand, and why you must review the finished document page by page before sending it. This tool does not replace human review.
Free redacts 5 documents a month, up to 3 pages each. The redaction itself is complete and identical to Pro. What changes is the report: the free report carries a DEMO watermark and the Pro report does not; the checks themselves are identical. Pro is a one-time payment of 59 € — not a subscription — and adds unlimited documents and batch processing of several files at once.
On a scanned page the pixels inside the area you mark are cleared. Automatic detection reads text, not images, so on a scan you mark the areas yourself. Note that on a page with no text layer there is nothing for the tool to re-read afterwards, so it cannot confirm the removal the way it does on text — the report says so explicitly for those pages, and you must check them visually.
Because the document contains an image — usually the letterhead logo — and this tool does not read what is inside an image. In that case the report says "PARTIAL CHECK" and spells out what it did do: it re-read the text of every page of the delivered file and its metadata, no data matching the searched patterns remains, and it lists one by one the pages whose image content is left out. "REDACTION VERIFIED" is reserved for text-only documents, where nothing falls outside the scope. Most minutes and payslips carry a logo, so "PARTIAL CHECK" is the normal result and does not mean something went wrong: it is the report stating how far it reached. If one of those images contains data, mark it by hand and its pixels will be cleared, but the page will still be listed as not fully checked: there is no text left to re-read to confirm it, which is why the report asks you to review it visually.
No, and it is not sold as one. The report is a technical record of what the tool did: which areas were redacted, which metadata was removed, which patterns were searched in the finished file, which pages could not be checked, and the SHA-256 fingerprint of the file you deliver. It documents that you carried out and verified the removal. It makes no statement about your legal obligations, and no tool can decide what you were required to redact.
It is operated from Spain by an individual trader — the details are in the legal notice at the bottom of this page. The source code is open under AGPL-3.0, so anyone can verify that nothing is uploaded. Payment and invoicing are handled by Gumroad as merchant of record.
Redact your PDF now — free, and without uploading it to any server
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