You are the product, or you are the customer. Pick one.

Almost every tool you use to do your work is paid for by somebody who is not you. That arrangement has consequences, and they land on the person whose documents are involved, which is usually not the person who agreed to it.

The deal nobody read

Free office software is not charity. It is funded by knowing things about you: what you write, who you write to, what you search for on the way, and what that predicts about what you will buy. The product is good, often excellent, and the price is a permanent record of your working life held by a company whose interests are not yours.

The paid alternative asks for money and keeps the arrangement. You buy the licence, the subscription renews, the files still live on their servers, and the terms still change without asking you.

Both models share one assumption: that your work has to pass through somebody else's computer to be useful. That assumption is a business decision. It is not a technical requirement.

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

What we built instead

OBSCURA OS runs in the browser tab you already have open. The document you type, the spreadsheet you calculate, the contract you compare, the photograph you strip of its GPS coordinates: all of it is processed by JavaScript executing on your own machine, in your own memory.

There is no upload step. Not an encrypted one, not a “we promise not to look” one. There is no account, no password, no profile, and no server-side copy of anything you make. We cannot hand your files to an advertiser, a data broker, a court, or an attacker who breaches us, for the simple reason that we never receive them.

This is architecture, not a promise.

A privacy policy is a statement of intent that can be revised. A tool that has nowhere to send your data cannot change its mind next quarter.

Who this is actually for

Anyone whose work involves other people's confidential material, where a leak is somebody else's problem before it is yours:

• Journalists handling documents that identify a source. A photograph carries the coordinates where it was taken; a leaked draft carries invisible marks identifying which copy it came from; a PDF redaction that only draws a black rectangle leaves the name underneath, selectable.
• Lawyers and paralegals under privilege, who cannot upload a client file to a free web tool to compare two versions of an agreement, and who need a redaction that actually removes the content rather than covering it.
• Therapists, accountants, and consultants holding records that belong to someone who never consented to a third-party cloud.
• Founders and freelancers reading a contract that came back with “a few small changes,” or waiting ninety days on an invoice for work already delivered.
• Anyone who has been told to just trust the platform and would rather not have to.

Before you rely on any of it, read the threat model: what each tool actually protects against, and what it does not.

Why this matters beyond convenience

The ability to write something down privately, and to hand it to one specific person and nobody else, is not a technical nicety. It is the precondition for a source talking to a reporter, for a client being honest with their lawyer, for a person seeking help without it following them. When every tool that touches a document also reports on it, that ability quietly disappears, not by anyone deciding to end it, but by there being nowhere left to do it.

We are not going to overstate our part in that. This is software; it is not protection from a determined state adversary, and every tool on this site says on its own page exactly where its technique stops working. But the everyday case: the file that should never have left your laptop and did, because the only tool available wanted it on a server first: that case is solvable, and this is what solving it looks like.

How this is paid for, plainly

Software costs something to build, so here is the honest accounting rather than a slogan.

The Workspace (documents, spreadsheets, slides, notes, calendar, drive and the PDF editor) is free, at home and at work, with no account and no advertising. We used to run ads on the Workspace, and we stopped: ads meant an advertising network watching which browsers visited, which does not belong on a site that exists to keep your work yours.

What is paid is OBSCURA Pro. The Workspace stays free, and every other tool is free to open and to check a file with, so you see your problem before you are asked for anything. Saving the fixed file or the report is Pro, as are the whole Sovereign Suite application, the Photo Editor, the Engineering Suite, PDF Studio and OBSCURA Case: US$9 a month for everything, US$4 a month for one application on its own, or US$2 to save from one tool for a day. Pro is a key rather than an account, and it runs on your machine like everything else.

We are a small operation and we would rather be paid by the people using the software than by people buying access to them.

What we will not do

• We will not add an account system to make the numbers look better. The absence of one is the point.
• We will not claim a tool does something it does not. Every tool states its own limits on its own page, including where the technique fails. If a feature could not be built honestly, it is not on the site, and where we have found overstated claims in our own work, we have removed them rather than left them up.
• We will not sell your data, because we never hold it.

Start free

The Workspace Suite needs no signup and no payment. If you want to see the principle demonstrated in ten seconds, the photo metadata checker will show you the exact coordinates your phone wrote into your last photograph: reading it in your browser, without the image ever being uploaded.

Questions: [email protected]