RealRedact

PDF redaction that actually works.

The sensitive text is genuinely gone — so even ChatGPT or Claude can’t read what you redacted.

Real Redact truly removes the text from the file itself — not a black box you can peel off — so you can safely paste contracts, medical records, or financial docs into any AI tool. The file never leaves your Mac.

Download free for Mac Apple Silicon · M1 / M2 / M3 / M4 Download free for Mac Intel · Pre-2020 Macs

macOS 11+ · Signed & notarised by Apple · Zero network calls · No account, nothing uploaded

Don’t trust us — test us. Download a PDF we redacted and try to recover the text yourself. You can’t — it’s genuinely gone. That’s the whole product.

Most redaction doesn’t actually work

Draw a black box over text in Preview — or most other PDF tools — and the text underneath is still in the file. Anyone with a free command-line tool can pull it back out in seconds. It’s the same mistake that exposed Paul Manafort’s court filing: lawyers “redacted” a PDF, and within minutes anyone could copy the hidden text straight out.

Real Redact deletes the text from the file. There is nothing left underneath the bar.

How it works

  1. Open the app and drop in a PDF.
  2. Type a word — or just highlight it in the document — and Real Redact catches every instance, everywhere it appears. It also auto-finds emails, phone numbers, cards, SSNs, tax IDs, and dates.
  3. Save. You get a new, genuinely-redacted PDF; the original is untouched.

One word, every instance. Most tools make you black out each occurrence by hand — miss one and you’ve leaked. Real Redact finds and removes them all in a single pass.

About 30 seconds, start to finish.

Verifiably offline

Real Redact makes zero network calls — no uploads, no telemetry, no auto-update. No subscription, no cloud: everything happens on your Mac and stays there.

Don’t take our word for it — check. Run it behind Little Snitch in “block all” mode and watch nothing happen. If anything ever lights up, the whole claim is dead — and we’d want to know.