Drop a PDF here
Or click to choose one. PDFMod will tell you whether it is already protected.
Add or remove a PDF password.
Drop a file in and PDFMod tells you what it is already carrying, then offers the one honest thing to do about it. The encryption happens here, in this tab — the password is typed on your machine and used on your machine.
$99 once and the whole toolkit is yours — Acrobat is about $155 a year and stops working the day you stop paying. And the file you are locking stays on your laptop: we never see it, or the password, because nothing you open here is stored on a server.
Runs on this device · we never see your file, or your password
Worth knowing
- Removing a password means knowing it. PDFMod does not crack anything. If you have lost the password, no honest tool can open the file — and any site offering to try wants your document on its server.
- Restrictions are not a password. A PDF that opens without being asked, but says you may not print it, carries an owner password. Every reader opens it. PDFMod names that case for what it is rather than pretending to unlock something.
- The permission tick boxes are requests, not security.Print, copy, edit and comment are recorded in the file and honoured by Preview, Acrobat and most readers — and ignored by anything that decides to. The words are fully readable in the file either way, and any tool can strip the flags in seconds; PDFMod’s own unlock does exactly that. Every competitor calls this “protect your PDF from printing and copying”, which is not true. If something must genuinely not be extractable, the tool for that is Redact, which removes it.
- The encryption is real. AES-128, and the document properties and form values are encrypted along with the pages — a detail the underlying library gets wrong, and PDFMod fixes, so nothing readable is left sitting in the clear.
- A digital signature will not survive it. Adding or removing a password rewrites the whole file, including the bytes a signature was calculated over. PDFMod checks for one and says so before you commit — and when the file is locked and it genuinely cannot see inside to check, it says that instead of guessing, then tells you what it found once the file is open.
- There is no recovery. We never see your password, so we could not reset it even if you asked. Write it down before you close the tab.