GhostMyData's answer

More coverage (1,500+ brokers), lower price ($9.99/mo vs $14.98 for Incogni), free scan with 3 free trial removals (no credit card), family plans covering 5 members, and transparent compliance reporting. We also use dual search engines (Google + Brave) to find exposures competitors miss.

KeptPDF's answer:

Three reasons.

Privacy you can verify, not just a promise. Processing happens locally in the browser, so there is no upload step to trust. We do send anonymous usage counts for quota, and we say so plainly, but never your document.

Real redaction with proof. Removed text is permanently gone, and you get a certificate showing the file was checked for leftover extractable text. Automated detection cannot catch everything, so a final human review is still your job, and the tool says that too.

It works on a phone. Most PDF suites assume a desktop. KeptPDF was built and used on a phone first, so redacting a document while you are standing in a hallway actually works.

GhostMyData's answer

We cover 1,500+ data broker sites — 3.5x more than Incogni and 17x more than DeleteMe's auto-removal. We send legally-enforceable CCPA deletion requests, not just opt-out forms. And we publish a live broker compliance report showing which brokers actually delete your data and which ignore requests.

KeptPDF's answer:

KeptPDF runs entirely in your browser. Your file, and the text inside it, never leaves your device. Not to an AI, not even to us. You can open your browser's network tab and watch: the document bytes never go out.

Most online PDF tools upload your file to a server first, and some "AI redaction" services quietly send your document text to a third-party model. That is the exact risk people are trying to avoid when they redact something.

KeptPDF also does true redaction. The text is removed from the file, not covered with a black box you can copy out later. Every redaction produces a verification certificate you can share with the file.

GhostMyData's answer

Privacy-conscious individuals and families who want their personal data removed from people-search sites and data brokers. Also businesses protecting employees from social engineering attacks that exploit exposed personal data.

KeptPDF's answer:

Anyone who has to hand a document to someone else and needs the sensitive parts gone first.

In practice that is solo attorneys and small law firms, accountants and tax preparers, healthcare and records staff handling requests, HR teams, and individuals dealing with their own medical, legal, or financial paperwork.

The common thread is not an industry. It is a person who cannot upload a confidential file to a random website, and who does not have an enterprise IT budget to solve it.

GhostMyData's answer

I discovered my full name, home address, phone numbers, and family members' details were publicly listed on hundreds of people-search sites — available to anyone for under a dollar. After spending 40+ hours manually submitting opt-out forms, I realized the data just comes back. So I built GhostMyData to automate the entire process.

KeptPDF's answer:

A family member got seriously ill. We spent most days at the hospital, and straight answers were hard to come by, so we leaned on AI tools to make sense of the records, notes, and lab results.

But you cannot paste a medical record into an AI chat. You have to strip the names, the ID numbers, the diagnoses first. And almost every tool we found either wanted to upload the whole file to a server, or "auto-redacted" by sending the document text to an online AI. That was the exact thing we were trying to avoid.

Most of this was happening on a phone, at a bedside. So I built the tool I needed: redaction that runs on the device, works on mobile, and never sends the file anywhere. That turned into KeptPDF, which is now a full PDF suite with over 20 tools, all local-first.

GhostMyData's answer

Next.js, React, TypeScript, Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL, Vercel, Resend for transactional email, Amazon SES for broker CCPA emails, Google and Brave Search APIs for exposure detection.

KeptPDF's answer:

The app is plain JavaScript with no front-end framework, which keeps it fast and keeps the code auditable.

PDF work happens in the browser using pdf.js for rendering and pdf-lib for writing. Text recognition uses Tesseract running as WebAssembly. Password and encryption handling uses a WebAssembly build of qpdf. It is a Progressive Web App, so it installs and works offline.

The thin server side is Node on Vercel, with Postgres for accounts, Stripe for billing, and Resend for email. None of those ever see a document.

GhostMyData's answer

• Individual privacy-conscious consumers
• Families protecting household members (up to 5 per plan)
• Businesses protecting employee data from social engineering

KeptPDF's answer:

KeptPDF is early and independent, and we do not publish customer names. The product is privacy-first by design: we never see your documents, and we do not track who our users are or what they work on. Publishing a client list would sit badly next to that.

The user base today is mostly solo attorneys, small firms, accountants, and individuals handling their own records.