PrivacyNotes's answer:

Honestly? We have no idea, and that is the entire point. Signup is anonymous (a recovery phrase or Google, no email or personal details), the app ships zero analytics and zero trackers, and zero-knowledge encryption means we cannot see who you are or what you store. We could not name a single customer if we tried. A privacy product that tracked its users closely enough to brag about them would be missing the plot.

AegisPDF's answer

AegisPDF never uploads your documents. Redaction, OCR, editing and fill & sign all happen on your own computer, inside the browser you already have. That is not a privacy policy, it is how the product is built. There is no upload step to opt out of.

For a practice handling privileged files, that removes a whole category of risk: no cloud copy of a client document to protect, no outside document processor to disclose, and nothing of yours to lose if a vendor is breached. It also means unmetered use. Processing a document costs us nothing, so there are no page caps, no per-file fees and no upload limits.

PrivacyNotes's answer:

PrivacyNotes is the only zero-knowledge encrypted workspace that keeps notes, tasks, journals, files, and a password vault behind one set of on-device keys. Most privacy apps do one of those well and rent it to you monthly. We do all five, encrypt everything with XChaCha20-Poly1305 before it leaves your device, and charge once instead of forever. The encryption core is open core, published so the claims can be verified rather than trusted.

AegisPDF's answer

Against the web PDF tools, your file simply never leaves your machine, so the confidentiality question never comes up.

Against the local desktop editors, there are three differences. There is nothing to install, which matters a great deal when your work laptop is managed by IT and you cannot add software to it. AegisPDF is built around redaction rather than treating it as one tool in a large suite: it removes the underlying content on export instead of drawing a black box over it, and it can find emails, phone numbers, cards and SSNs for you. And it has a Team tier with central seat management, which the free local tools do not.

Against Adobe Acrobat Pro specifically, Pro is $14 per user per month against roughly $23, which is nearly 40% less.

PrivacyNotes's answer:

Three reasons:

• One app, not four subscriptions. Standard Notes, Day One, and Lunatask each rent you a slice (notes, journaling, tasks). PrivacyNotes covers all of them plus files and a vault, for a fair one-time fee.
• Real zero-knowledge. Your keys come from a recovery phrase that never touches our servers, so we cannot read your notes, your filenames, or your metadata. Some encrypted apps leave note or task metadata in the clear; we do not.
• Verifiable, not just trusted. The crypto and schema are open core and published for review, and there is no ad, tracker, or analytics anywhere in the app.

AegisPDF's answer

Solo practitioners and small practices, roughly one to fifty people: lawyers, paralegals, accountants, bookkeepers, HR staff and medical records staff. The common thread is that they handle confidential client and patient files themselves, without an IT department, and they are not allowed to upload those files to a cloud tool.

A secondary audience is privacy-conscious individuals who simply do not want their documents sitting on someone else's server.

PrivacyNotes's answer:

Privacy-conscious individuals and independent professionals who handle information they would not want a vendor reading: lawyers, journalists, healthcare and mental-health practitioners, developers, security specialists, researchers, and founders. It also fits anyone who simply wants one private home for their notes, tasks, journaling, and wellness tracking instead of spreading them across surveillance-funded apps.

PrivacyNotes's answer:

React, TypeScript, Vite and Tailwind CSS.

AegisPDF's answer

AegisPDF started from a narrow observation: the people with the most sensitive documents have the worst PDF options. The convenient web tools ask you to upload the file first, which is exactly what a lawyer, an accountant or an HR manager cannot do with a privileged document. The alternative was a heavyweight desktop suite that a managed work laptop often will not let you install in the first place.

So we built a PDF workstation that runs in the browser but processes everything on your own machine, so the convenience of a web tool does not cost you custody of the file. Redaction came first and stayed at the centre of it: not a black box drawn over the text, but the underlying content actually removed on export. Everything since has been built around that.

PrivacyNotes's answer:

PrivacyNotes started from a simple frustration: staying organized meant scattering your life across half a dozen apps, most of which could read everything you typed and billed you monthly for the privilege. We wanted one place for notes, tasks, journals, files, and passwords, encrypted so thoroughly that the people running the servers could not read a word of it, and paid for once rather than forever. So we built the encryption first, made the keys live only on your device, and published the crypto as open core so the promise could be checked, not just believed. Everything else grew from one rule: your data is yours, and no one else's to mine.