Portals reject anything over 10 MB. Email chokes at 25. The usual fix is mailing your lease to a server farm. This one runs in the room your documents never leave — turn off your Wi-Fi and it still compresses.
Most PDFs are heavy because of oversized images and embedded baggage. BlackoutPDF re-renders every page at the resolution you pick and rebuilds a brand-new PDF from those pixels — like running your document through a very good scanner.
The honest trade-off: the output is made of images, so text is no longer selectable. That's how it gets small — and as a bonus, the original metadata, edit history, and hidden layers don't survive the rebuild.
And because every byte of this happens inside your browser tab, there is no upload to intercept and no "files deleted after 2 hours" policy to take on faith. The court portal gets a smaller file. Nobody else gets anything.
Free for small jobs · $19/year for unlimited · $4.99/month for batch compress and every other superpower — Auto-Redact, the signature library, Bates stamping. Every plan covers Compress, Redact, Sign, Merge and Convert on all your devices. 30-day refund, no questions.
Your browser does everything. The PDF is decoded in memory, each page is re-rendered to pixels at your chosen resolution, re-encoded as JPEG, and assembled into a new PDF — all in this tab. You can verify it: open DevTools → Network, compress a file, and watch zero requests carry your data. Or just turn your Wi-Fi off first.
No — and we'd rather tell you that than hide it. The compressed PDF is built from page images, like a clean scan, which is exactly how it gets dramatically smaller. If you need the text layer preserved, keep the original for editing and use the compressed copy for sending.
It depends on what's inside. Scans and image-heavy PDFs routinely shrink 60–90% on the Email preset. Files that are already tightly optimized may shrink little — and if the result somehow comes out larger, we'll say so plainly and still let you download it. No fake progress bars, no inflated "savings."
The free tier compresses documents up to 10 pages, forever. Plus — $19/year — removes every page and file limit across the entire BlackoutPDF suite — redact, sign, merge, compress, convert — on all your devices, with every future feature included. That's a full year of unlimited for less than one month of Acrobat Pro. Pro — $4.99/month — is everything in Plus, plus the weekly-workflow superpowers: batch compress on this page, auto-redact, the signature library, Bates stamping, and batch convert. Either way: 30-day refund, no account, and your license key is your receipt.
Drop several PDFs at once (a Pro feature) and each one is compressed right here in this tab with the preset you picked — same pipeline as a single file, just run back to back. The outputs are then bundled into compressed.zip in your browser's memory and handed to you as a download. Zero files leave the room; open DevTools → Network while it runs if you want the receipts.
The free tier compresses documents up to 10 pages. Plus removes every limit on the whole suite — a full year for less than one month of Acrobat Pro.
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