Introducing Redaction Tools

Redaction software is usually bought under pressure: a disclosure deadline, an audit, a breach. That is a bad time to discover the market is hard to compare. Vendors publish prices in different units, some publish none at all, and "free" can mean a free tier or a fortnight's trial depending on who wrote the page.

Redaction Tools is a catalog built to make that comparison possible. This post covers what is in it, how we keep it honest, and where it is going.

What the catalog is

Each listed tool has its own page. It covers what the tool redacts (PDF, images, video, audio), how it finds what to redact, where it runs, and what it costs. You can filter the list along each of those dimensions. Each filter narrows the list. None of them quietly widens it.

A tool has to clear a published bar before it gets a page. It needs a working website, a logo, a few hundred words written by us rather than by the vendor, and a pricing position. A pricing position is a current price, a free tier, or an explicit "contact sales". "We could not find out" is not a position. The full bar is in the methodology.

Prices you can check

A price in this catalog always comes with three things:

• Its unit. Per page, per document, per seat, per month. Two published prices usually cannot be compared as printed, and pricing units explains why.
• Its source. Read automatically from the vendor's public pricing page, entered by one of our editors, or supplied by the vendor. A vendor-supplied figure is labelled not independently verified, because it is not.
• The date we last checked it. We re-check prices far more often than they change, so this date reflects our attention, not the vendor's.

Figures entered by staff or vendors are pinned, so an automated reading can never silently overwrite them. We also refuse a few things that comparison tables often do. We never present a trial as a free tier. We never quote an annual-prepay rate as a monthly one. We never invent a limit the vendor has not published.

A cost, not just a price

A published price is not a cost until you supply a volume. The price calculator asks for two numbers: how many documents you process a month, and how many pages each has. It then works out every plan at the vendor's own rate. Where a plan cannot serve that volume at any price, it says so rather than guessing.

Readable by machines

The catalog is a database with a website in front of it, and the database is open. There is a public REST API with no key required. Two plain-text files, /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, carry every listed tool's price and provenance for readers that are not browsers.

Help us fill it in

If we are missing a tool, submit it. An editor checks it and writes the listing, and it goes live only once it clears the same bar as everything else. If you work for a vendor, you can claim your listing and propose corrections. Every correction is reviewed by a person before anything changes.

This blog will carry new listings, changes to how we verify prices, and what we learn along the way. The RSS feed is the easiest way to follow it.