Basalt

18 PDF tools for Mac, with redaction that proves itself

ProductivityLaunched Oct 2026

The story

Basalt puts 18 PDF tools in one native Mac window: merge, split, compress, OCR, Bates numbering, forms, signatures and comparison. Redaction is the core. Redaction removes the text and pixels from the file itself, not a black box drawn over text, and strips metadata, XMP, attachments and hidden layers. A verifier re-opens the output with an independent parser and proves the job before any file is written, then issues a certificate you can check with shasum and openssl. The document engine has no network access at all. No cloud, no account. $29 lifetime, free for 24 hours, macOS 13 or later.

Overview

Basalt puts 18 PDF tools in one native Mac window: merge, split, compress, OCR, Bates numbering, forms, signatures and comparison. Redaction is the core.

Redaction removes the text and pixels from the file itself, not a black box drawn over text, and strips metadata, XMP, attachments and hidden layers. A verifier re-opens the output with an independent parser and proves the job before any file is written, then issues a certificate you can check with shasum and openssl.

The document engine has no network access at all. No cloud, no account. $29 lifetime, free for 24 hours, macOS 13 or later.