Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Every tool in PDF Vault runs entirely in your browser. Your files are opened as in-memory buffers, processed locally, and never transmitted to any server. There is no upload endpoint — you can verify this in your browser's DevTools Network tab.

No account is required for the Free plan or for basic tools. You only sign up when you upgrade to PDF Vault Pro so we can associate your license with an email for support and cross-device sync.

Open the Merge PDFs tool from the sidebar, drop or select the files you want combined, drag them into the order you prefer, and click Download. The merged PDF is generated locally and downloaded straight to your device.

Open Split & Extract, load the PDF, choose either 'every page becomes a file' or a custom page range (e.g. 1-3,7,9), then export. Each output PDF is created client-side.

Use the Compress tool — it re-encodes images, downsamples them to the chosen DPI, and rewrites object streams. Typical savings are 40-70% on scan-heavy documents. Everything happens in your browser.

Yes. Open Sign Document, draw or upload your signature, drag it onto the page, and download. Signatures are stored only on your device (localStorage) so no cloud service ever sees them.

Yes. The PDF to Word tool ships a client-side layout engine that extracts text, tables, and simple formatting into a DOCX file that opens in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or LibreOffice — no upload required.

Yes. Our OCR tool runs a Tesseract-based recognizer locally. It supports 40+ languages and produces a searchable text layer that you can copy, export as .txt, or embed back into the PDF.

Open Protect PDF, load the file, enter a password, and download. The output uses standard PDF encryption so it opens in Adobe Acrobat, Preview, and any modern viewer.

Use Unlock PDF and provide the current password. Removing protection from files you do not own is not permitted by our terms.

Yes — once the page has loaded once, the whole app is cached as a Progressive Web App. You can install it from your browser's address bar and use every tool without an internet connection.

The Free plan gives you 3 operations per day forever with the core tools. PDF Vault Pro is from $10/month billed yearly, or $15 month-to-month, and removes all limits, unlocks advanced tools, and gives you signature templates and Bates numbering.

Those services upload your file to a remote server. PDF Vault processes everything locally in your browser, so sensitive documents never leave your device. That also makes it faster on modern machines because you skip the network round-trip.

Practically any size your browser can hold in memory — most modern laptops handle PDFs up to a few hundred MB comfortably. There is no server-side limit because there is no server.

PDF Vault can only work with a file that's actually on your device — it isn't a recovery tool, so it can't bring back something that's missing, corrupted, or already deleted. For that, our sister tool recovers deleted or corrupted files straight from a Mac or Windows drive, with nothing uploaded to any cloud. Recover the file, then bring it back here to merge, sign, compress, or convert it. Cinder Data Recovery →

Yes. Bates Stamping (configurable prefixes, page ranges and starting numbers) and true redaction in the PDF Editor are both available on the Free plan, subject to the same 3-operations-a-day limit as every other tool — Pro just removes that limit. Redaction here actually removes the covered content from the file rather than drawing a box over it; see the Sanitize tool to also strip hidden metadata before disclosure.

In the PDF Editor, really gone. Many tools only draw a box over the text, which stays in the file underneath — selectable and searchable. PDF Vault's redaction rewrites the redacted page as a flattened image, removes any form field values on that page, and drops the document's structure-tree text, so there's nothing left to select or extract. You can verify this yourself: try to select or search for the covered text in the exported file.

Everything most tools leave behind: the Info dictionary (author, producer, timestamps), XMP metadata, the document ID, embedded JavaScript, attachments, comments, and form field values — shown to you first so you choose what to keep. The file is rewritten from scratch on export, which also drops any earlier revision history some editors leave appended to the file.

Yes — the OCR tool supports Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, and Korean along with 35+ other languages. Select the document's actual language before running OCR; recognition accuracy depends on matching it correctly.

Sign in, open Pricing and choose Manage billing — or email support@getpdfvault.com. Cancelling stops future renewals; your Pro access remains until the end of the current billing period.