Security

Nothing to breach, because we never had it.

Every other security page explains how carefully a company guards the copy of your file on its servers. This one shows you why there isn't a copy.

0bytes of document data transmitted, ever
0accounts needed to run the app
100%of processing on your own CPU
1message, once, when you activate
What crosses the line

Everything on the left never moves.

Stays on your machine

Everything that matters

  • Your documents, in full
  • Filenames and folder paths
  • Page counts, word counts, content
  • Which tools you used and when
  • Redacted text — deleted, never transmitted
  • OCR results and converted output
  • Your signature library
  • Any record that you opened the app at all

There is no upload path in the software. Not one that's switched off — none at all. A setting can be misconfigured; an absent code path cannot.

Your machine
Leaves once, at activation

Three small things

  • 1An activation token — random, not derived from anything about you
  • 2Four one-way hashes of machine identifiers, which we cannot reverse
  • 3Team only: the work email your staff member types, so you can see who holds each seat

Enterprise sends nothing at all, ever. If your requirement is zero outbound traffic under all conditions, that's the tier — organisation-wide signed files, deployed by your own tooling, to machines with no route out.

Test this one yourself

A black box is not a redaction.

Most tools draw a rectangle over the words and leave them in the file. Select the text in both panels below and paste it somewhere.

Covered — the usual way
Remit to account 4471 0092 8830 on behalf of M. Adeyemi-Cole, within thirty days.
Copy that line →
4471 0092 8830 and M. Adeyemi-Cole come out with it.
Removed — VellumDoc
Remit to account                on behalf of                , within thirty days.
Copy the same passage →
nothing comes out. Then the saved file is re-opened and searched. Verified: 0 recoverable.

If a single word survives the check, the operation reports itself as failed rather than quietly succeeding. Redaction is the one place where "probably worked" is worthless, so it's the one place we verify instead of assume.

How it holds up

Six things a reviewer will ask about.

/ 01

Ed25519 signatures

Licences are signed files. The app holds only the public verification key; the private key never leaves our infrastructure. A forged or altered licence fails verification offline.

/ 02

Bound to hardware

Each licence is locked to the machine it was issued to, with drift tolerance so a replaced network card doesn't lock out a paying user. A copied licence won't run elsewhere.

/ 03

Encrypted local state

Trial and licence state is AES-256-GCM encrypted and machine-bound, so it can't be copied to another machine to extend anything.

/ 04

Clock-rollback detection

The app keeps a monotonic record of the furthest time it has ever seen. Winding the system clock backwards is detected and rejected.

/ 05

No password to steal

Account sign-in is a one-time emailed link. We store no passwords, so there are none to breach, reuse or leak.

/ 06

Nothing fetched at runtime

The OCR engine and document converter are bundled inside the application. Nothing is downloaded while it runs, so there's nothing to intercept or substitute.

Supply chain

Nothing for your legal team to review.

Some software is built on components with copyleft licences — AGPL and GPL. Sell a product built on those and you can be obliged to publish your own source code, which is why many corporate and government open-source policies ban them outright. A product containing one needs a legal review before anyone can buy it.

VellumDoc contains none. Every third-party component is MIT, BSD or Apache — licences that place no obligation on us or on you. And nothing here is a paid library whose vendor could raise the price, change the terms, or withdraw it while you're mid-contract.

What's inside
MITBSDApache 2.0
What isn't, by design
AGPLGPLCommercial / revocable

This wasn't luck. The PDF compression engine was originally an AGPL library — it was removed and rewritten from scratch on permissive components, specifically so that a procurement reviewer opening our component list finds nothing to escalate.

For your vendor assessment

Written to be pasted in.

Security questionnaires ask the same six questions. Here are the answers, in the form they're usually wanted.

VellumDoc — vendor security summary30 July 2026
Data processing
All document processing occurs locally on the end-user device. No document content, metadata, filename or usage data is transmitted to the vendor or any third party at any time. The vendor holds no customer documents and operates no document-processing infrastructure.
Network activity
Professional and Team editions transmit one message per device at licence activation, containing an activation token and hashed hardware identifiers, and receive a signed licence file. No further network activity occurs. Enterprise edition performs no network activity of any kind and is suitable for air-gapped deployment.
Data retained
For licensed customers: email address, licence records, activated device fingerprints (hashed), operating system, and order history. Stored in a Singapore-region database with row-level security. No document data of any kind.
Sub-processors
Stripe (payment processing) and Resend (transactional email). No analytics, advertising or tracking providers are used in the application or on this website.
Cryptography
Ed25519 for licence signatures; AES-256-GCM for local state at rest; SHA-256 for device fingerprint hashing.
Open-source licensing
All third-party components are MIT, BSD or Apache licensed. No copyleft dependencies.

Need this on letterhead, or a specific questionnaire completed? Ask us — procurement requests get answered first.

Don't take our word for it

Three ways to check in five minutes.

This is the rare security claim you can test yourself, without trusting us at all.

/ 01

Block it at the firewall

Deny all outbound traffic for VellumDoc and process a hundred files. Everything works identically, because there was never a call to make.

/ 02

Watch the connections

Run Little Snitch, LuLu or your own network monitoring while you work. After activation there is nothing to see.

/ 03

Pull the cable

Put it on a machine with no network interface at all. Every feature still runs — that's what Enterprise deployment relies on.

Next See it compared Against online converters, desktop PDF editors and cloud storage — on price, security and output quality.
Free trial

Test it on your own files.
Nothing will leave.

Every feature for 30 days. No account, no card, no upload.