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OnwardAI · guide · checked 2026-10-29

Remove names, phones and IDs from a document before you share it. On your own computer.

A chat log for a lawyer, a case note for a colleague, a transcript for a study, a thread you want to post. The names in it are not yours to hand around. The usual answer is a redaction service, and the usual catch is that the service reads the document to clean it. Here is how to do it without that, and what the going tools cost, read off their own pages this week.

What the market offers

Cloud services (Redactable from $19 a month for 15 documents, RedactifyAI $19 to $250 a month, iDox.ai from $39 a month): fast, smart, and your document goes to their server first; that is the mechanism. Desktop editors (PDFelement $139.99 once, Foxit about $210 once, Acrobat Pro $19.99 a month): stay on your machine, built for PDFs, priced for offices. Presidio, Microsoft’s free library: strong, local, and a programmer’s tool, not a button. None of them hands you proof afterwards of what was changed.

Prices read from the vendors’ pages and 2026 comparison guides on 2026-10-29; they move, check before you buy.

Do it on your own machine

  1. Save the text as a .txt file.
  2. Drag it onto ANONYMIZE_A_FILE. Pick a profile (HIPAA, GDPR, journalism, science, legal, art, personal, generic); the profile decides what counts as identifying.
  3. Two files appear beside yours: the clean copy, and a receipt of every change.
  4. Read the clean copy. The receipt lists, in daylight, the things no rule can decide for you: a known name written in lowercase, a name at the start of a sentence, a word one letter away from a name. Your eyes go there, then you share.

ANONYMiZE, $19 once. Nothing leaves the computer; no account; the same person gets the same stand-in every time, in every file you run, so a reader of the clean copy learns that two lines share a name and nothing more. An optional local name model, installed once, catches names the capital-letter rule cannot (lowercase mentions, names at sentence starts) and swaps far fewer ordinary words; the receipt says which decided the names on each run.

What the receipt is for

Anyone you hand the clean copy to can check, with the free receipt tool and the network shut, that it was derived from your original by exactly the changes listed and nothing else, without ever seeing the original. That is the difference between “I redacted it” and proof that you did.

Where it fits

Your ChatGPT or Claude export, rebuilt with RECLAiM ($19), cleaned with ANONYMiZE, searched with SiFT ($29). The whole pipeline →

Why bother? Because your record is yours. Accounts close, policies change, companies get acquired. A copy on your own machine answers to nobody. ← OnwardAI · the store · how to export · how it all fits