Free PDF redactor that runs client-side
Details
- External ID
- 47826529
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Free PDF redactor that runs client-side
- Website domain
- redactpdf.net
- Launched
- April 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.11182519280205655
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I recently needed to verify past employment and to do so I was going to upload paystubs from a previous employer, however I didn't want to share my salary in that role. I did a quick search online and most sites required sign-up or weren't clear about document privacy. I conceded and signed up for a free trial of Adobe Acrobat so I could use their PDF redaction feature. I figured there should be a dead simple way of doing this that's private, so I decided to create it myself.What this does is rasterize each page to an image with your redactions burned in, then it rebuilds the PDF so the text layer is permanently destroyed and not just covered up and easily retrievable.I welcome any and all feedback as this is my first live tool, thanks!
Enrichment
- Theme
- document and PDF utility tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- pdf redactor that runs client-side
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Client-side PDF redaction can be fully built in the browser using standard open-source libraries like PDF.js and pdf-lib with an HTML5 canvas overlay.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Export as PNG and manually redact, PDF.js, pdf-lib
Concerns raised: Metadata from original PDF may survive conversion process, PNG roundtrip could leak embedded info (creation dates, software used, thumbnails), Requires internet connection for CDN libraries even with offline use case, Steganographically stored information theoretically impossible to remove completely
Feature requests: Explicit metadata stripping from output file, Support for fully offline operation without CDN dependencies, Additional redaction safety measures beyond basic rasterization
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 331 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #326 of 332 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 166 days after the earliest competitor.
- WipePDF · ph · 2026-09-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- BytePriva · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- PDFly · hn · 2026-07-24 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PDF Studio · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- EasyPDFNex · ph · 2026-09-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- PDFOrchard · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- KissThePDF · ph · 2026-09-13 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- QuietKit · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.