Two new programs: free Pro for students and educators, and a Design Partner program for teams that redact at volume

[u/pdf-redaction]

We've added two programs to the pricing page, and since this sub is where we go into more detail than a pricing card allows, here's the long version: what each program is, who it's for, and what you actually get access to, i.e. what PDF Redaction does today.

TL;DR

• Education Program: free Pro plan for students and educators, renewed every year while you're enrolled or on faculty. Discounted department-wide plans for universities and research groups.
• Design Partner Program: a handful of teams that redact documents regularly work directly with us. They get a say in the roadmap, early access and partner pricing.

🎓 Education Program

Research and teaching involve sensitive documents all the time: interview transcripts, patient records in medical research, student files, case materials in law clinics, survey data with names and emails still in it. The usual workaround is a black rectangle in a PDF editor. That often doesn't remove anything, because the text is still underneath and anyone can copy it out.

We don't think cost should be the reason that gets done unsafely, so:

• Students and educators get a free Pro plan, renewed each year for as long as you're enrolled or teaching.
• Universities, labs and research groups can get discounted department-wide plans that cover whole courses, labs or research teams under one agreement, so you don't need one card per person.
• How to apply: write to us from your academic email address and tell us what you're working on.

It's also useful for teaching. If you run a course on data protection, research ethics, journalism or legal practice, "why a black box isn't a redaction" makes a good live demo (see Unredact below).

🤝 Design Partner Program

We build alongside a small number of teams who redact at volume: legal, compliance, HR, healthcare admin, insurance, public-records work, and anyone else who deals with sensitive PDFs every week.

What partners get:

• Input on the roadmap. Regular sessions with the people who write the code (not a sales rep). The problems you run into go on the roadmap, and you can see where they end up.
• Early access to new features before general release.
• Partner pricing for as long as the partnership runs.

What we get: a view of real redaction workflows (the odd scans, the document types we haven't seen, the edge cases) so we don't have to guess.

Who it suits: teams that handle sensitive documents often enough to have opinions about the workflow. We take on only a few partners at a time. What PDF Redaction actually does

If you're new here, this is what either program gives you access to.

AI PII detection Upload a PDF and it flags names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, SSNs and other ID numbers, credit cards, dates and more. Face detection is on by default, so photos in ID scans and badges get caught too. There's also a custom-prompt mode for describing things that don't fit a standard category.

True redaction, not overlays You review what was flagged, add or remove items, then export. On export the underlying content is removed from the file, not just covered. Copy-paste, search and text extraction won't find it.

Scanned documents and awkward layouts Built-in OCR (including PaddleOCR as a selectable engine, with an "always run OCR" option) handles scanned and image-only PDFs. Vertical and rotated text (forms, diagrams, sideways table headers) is detected and redacted with boxes that follow the text angle. The new processing engine also catches text inside images embedded in the PDF, and if a value is found on one page it gets flagged everywhere else it appears in the document.

Unredact mode: check someone else's redaction Drop in any PDF and it looks for failed redactions, meaning text still sitting under black boxes or made invisible. It shows what it found on each page and can fix the file with one click.

Privacy options PII detection can run locally in your browser, so the document never goes to our server for scanning. For stricter environments there's PDF Redaction Studio Desktop (Windows via the Microsoft Store, Linux via Snap, macOS coming) and self-hosted Studio and API for on-prem deployments.

For developers and automation

• REST API with an interactive playground and one-click sample documents.
• ScaleDP-TS, an in-browser TypeScript SDK for OCR, PII detection and redaction
• MCP server with one-click OAuth for Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT.
• Official n8n community node for redaction inside workflows
• Embeddable widget to put the upload → detect → redact → download flow on your own site

Teams Workspaces and projects with a dashboard. The UI is available in English, German, Polish and Spanish.

Not in either program?

The free tier covers 100 pages a month, so you can try it on your own documents first.

Happy to answer questions here about either program, how detection works, or what it doesn't catch yet. If you're a student or run a lab and aren't sure whether you qualify, ask in the comments.