Questions & support

• People: names, signatures (drawn or scanned), dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, home and mailing addresses.
• Government IDs: Social Security numbers (even pre-masked ones), ITIN and EIN tax IDs, driver's license numbers, and national IDs from outside the US: UK National Insurance, France NIR, India PAN, Italy Codice Fiscale, Mexico RFC & CURP.
• Money & accounts: bank account and routing numbers (including international IBANs), credit and debit card numbers.
• Labeled numbers: insurance and medical IDs (policy, member, Medicare, medical-record), plus invoice, loan, employee, case, docket, and claim numbers.
• Vehicles: VINs.

You always get the final say. Every match shows up in the editor to confirm, and anything it didn't catch is one click to redact.

There are two video tours. The interactive tour walks you through the editor on a sample lease: finding what Cover caught, removing a redaction, adding your own, saving. The Pro Tour: Tax Return runs a full return and shows the tools around it. Clicking either link plays it inside Cover, on bundled demo documents.

They also live in Cover's Help menu, and on this site under Tour.

Yes. Open Settings ▸ Ai Assistants (open it for me) and click Add to Claude Desktop. From then on you can ask Claude to redact a PDF, and Cover does the work.

Never drop the PDF itself into Claude. The moment a document is attached to a chat, Claude reads all of its text, private details included, before Cover gets a chance to redact anything. Ask by name instead: “redact my 1099.pdf.” Cover finds it in your allowed folders, redacts it on your Mac, and hands Claude only the safe copy.

Want eyes on it first? Ask Claude to redact with a review, and the result opens in Cover's editor for you to confirm before Claude gets it.

Yes. Settings ▸ General has a Hide animations switch (open it for me). Everything works the same; Cover just skips the motion.

You usually don't have to: Cover checks for updates on its own and asks before installing one. To check right now, open the Cover menu and choose Check for Updates…. Automatic checking has a switch in Settings ▸ Updates (open it for me).

If you got Cover from the Mac App Store, it updates through the App Store instead.

It's removed. The sensitive characters come out of the document and the empty space gets filled with solid ink. We also clean hidden material a lot of people don't know is in there: form-field entries, document properties, edit history.

This matters because some redaction tools just draw a black rectangle on top of the original text. If you copy-paste from one of those PDFs, the redacted text comes back. With Cover, there's nothing underneath to recover.

The redaction is, yes. Turn off Wi-Fi and redact a file: everything runs on your Mac, and the finished PDF never touches a server. No accounts, no upload step.

When your Mac is online, the app makes three small housekeeping calls: it checks for updates, it sends an anonymous crash report if it crashes, and it reports the install and purchase events described in the next answer. None of them carries your documents or anything from them, and each can be turned off in Settings ▸ Privacy (open it for me).

The full story, in plain English: privacy policy.

Cover has no accounts and no sign-in. It does send install and purchase events: five events (installed, trial started, purchase screen shown, plan clicked, license activated) reported under a random identifier for your installed copy, which is also attached to a purchase so we can see which ads bring people who stay. That is per-user analytics and the privacy policy spells it out. It carries nothing from your documents and no file names, it is not kept indefinitely, and you can turn it off in Settings ▸ Privacy (open it for me).

If the app crashes, it sends an anonymous crash report (app version, macOS version, and where the code failed), never your documents or anything from them. You can turn this off in Settings too.

This site's page analytics are privacy-respecting and count page loads only. No cookies, no cross-site tracking.

Your documents themselves are processed on your Mac and are not transmitted to us, so we never receive their contents. There is no setting and no program in Cover that shares document data with us. The full policy, in plain English: privacy policy.

Cover is designed to map to the standards reviewers typically check. The same set of behaviors covers corporate, legal, and government use.

Two behaviors reviewers tend to care about most. First, every save is self-verified: Cover re-reads the finished file and confirms the removed text is byte-absent, including compressed data and leftover file history, or it refuses to save. Second, every save can include a redaction certificate and log, a page-by-page record of what was removed and which checks the file passed.

NSA/CSS PDF redaction

Hidden content and metadata cleared

Fed. R. Civ. P. 5.2 / 49.1

Helps filers meet court personal-identifier redaction rules

HIPAA Safe Harbor (45 CFR §164.514)

Safe Harbor identifier categories covered

PCI-DSS Requirement 3

Card numbers fully redacted

GDPR Arts. 4, 28, 44–49

Redacted output, processed fully on-device; no third-party processor involved

NIST SP 800-171 / CMMC Level 2

Document processing fully on-device; no document data egress

NARA FOIA processing

OCR runs on scans before redaction

EDRM / Sedona

Redaction certificate and per-run log, with every save

SOC 2

Designed to support your organization's confidentiality controls (CC6.1 / C1.2)

What it detects & removes: the full identifier list under “What kinds of information does Cover find?” above, from names and Social Security numbers through non-US national IDs, signatures, and case numbers.

True removal, not masking: redacted characters are deleted from the page content, not covered; hidden form-field values, document properties, and metadata are cleared; scans are redacted inside the image itself; and every file is re-extracted and byte-scanned before it's written. A file that fails verification is rejected rather than saved.

Not in scope: per-redaction FOIA exemption codes, and native e-discovery load files (Relativity, Concordance).

The same material, in handout form, lives in the Read Me's "For your IT, legal, or compliance team" section, and the verification chain is summarized on the security page.

Everyday personal and business paperwork: tax forms and full returns, bank and brokerage statements, medical bills and explanations of benefits, legal letters, insurance correspondence, leases, mortgage and closing packages, and government or immigration forms like the I-485.

There's no page limit. A 200-page tax return or a 400-page closing package redacts the same way a 2-page bill does. A longer document just takes longer, scaling with your Mac.

Mac only right now. We'd rather make it great on one platform than spread thin across three.

The free 7-day trial runs Cover on your real PDFs, end to end including save. Every feature is unlocked and there's no page or document limit, so you can prove the engine works on your documents rather than on a demo file.

Your 7 days are counted from the first PDF you actually redact, so downloading today and getting to it next week costs you nothing. Every PDF you save during the trial carries a watermark. After 7 days you need a license to keep working.

Buying stops the watermark on everything you save from then on. PDFs you already saved keep the watermark that was printed into them, so run those again to get clean copies.

All of it is in one place: open Cover and go to Settings ▸ License, or let this page take you there: open Settings ▸ License for me. What you need is on that pane, and which button you see depends on where you stand.

• Stop your license renewing: Turn off renewal. Your license keeps working to the end of the year you already paid for.
• Start it again after cancelling: Turn on renewal, in the same spot.
• Change the card: Update card, or Manage billing, which opens your billing page and returns you to Cover when you're done.
• A payment that didn't go through: the pane says so and gives you Pay with the amount on it.
• A license that has expired: Renew. That issues a fresh key at checkout, and Cover picks it up.

Both plans, Personal and Business, renew once a year.

Bought through the Mac App Store? Subscriptions there are managed by Apple, in System Settings ▸ Apple Account ▸ Subscriptions, not in Cover.

Want your money back instead? See what if it's not right for me.

If you bought on this site, write to us within 14 days of your purchase and we refund it. No form to fill in, and you don't have to justify it. The 7-day trial is there so you can check Cover against your own documents first, and the refund window covers the case where you bought without trying it.

To ask, use the message form at the top of this page, or email , and mention the email address you paid with. That address is how we find your purchase; nothing else is needed. If that mailbox is gone, give the purchase date or the last four digits of the card instead. The refund goes back to the card you paid with.

If you bought through the Mac App Store, Apple handles the payment and the refund, so that request goes to Apple under Apple's policy rather than to us.

A license bought here renews once a year, and the renewal is automatic. You can cancel any time before a renewal. Cancelling stops the next charge, and the license you already paid for runs to the end of its term. Here's where to do that, along with restarting a renewal or changing your card.

The full text: terms.

No. The Mac App Store sells Cover Business as a single seat, because subscriptions there cannot be bought in quantity.

On our website you can. Pick your seat count on the Business plan: the menu sits directly above the button, so the total is already right when you reach the checkout.

• Need a quote first? The instant quote is a printable document with your seat count, entity name, and the annual total.
• Need the W-9? Sent on request, made out to whichever entity you name.
• Already bought one seat in the Mac App Store? Tell us and we credit it.

Business licences get their own address: . Mail sent there is answered ahead of the general queue.

You do not have to remember it. In Cover, Help ▸ Cover Help opens this page with your licence already attached, and a message sent from the form goes to the same place.

It reaches the same people who answer everything else. The difference is which mail gets read first, not who reads it.

Yes. Ask through the message form at the top of this page or email , tell us the entity name to make it out to, and we send the Cover Redact LLC W-9 back to you.

On the receipt itself, payments are processed by Stripe as the merchant of record, so the seller shown on the invoice is Stripe's entity rather than ours. Stripe issues the invoice automatically at checkout and again at each renewal, with the organization name you enter at checkout on it.

For a purchase order or a budget approval, the instant quote gives you a printable document with your seat count, entity name, and the annual total.

Open Cover and go to Settings ▸ License (open it for me). Paste the key we emailed you.

Your checkout confirmation also has a Get your license key button, which hands the key straight to the app.

There's one Cover app. The download here is the same one you paid for, and the key is what unlocks it.

If Cover is already unlocked on your Mac, nothing is broken. It keeps working. You only need the key again for a new Mac or a fresh install, and an unlocked Cover shows the key itself in Settings ▸ License (open it for me), ready to copy over.

Search your mail for , and check spam. Still gone? Use the Email my key form above.

We only ever send a key to the address on the purchase, so nobody can move a license to a different address by asking.

If that mailbox is gone for good, use the form at the top of this page and we'll verify your purchase.