Why we built Endpaper

It began with a folder that was not allowed on the internet, and a quote for software that assumed it would be.

A great deal of work runs on documents that cannot be uploaded. A disclosure set before it is handed over. A board packet full of owners' details. A client file under a duty of confidence. A case bundle that has to arrive numbered, in order, with a contents page that actually works.

The tools for that work had all drifted the same way. Sign in. Upload. Subscribe. Renew. Watch the window fill with offers for the parts you did not buy. Read a policy that reserves the right to process your content in order to provide the service. For a lot of people that is not a preference they can override. It is a rule somebody else wrote.

The alternatives were a free viewer that stamped a watermark across anything you saved, or a $240-a-year suite where Bates numbering, real redaction and linked bundles sat buried under a hundred things we did not need.

The three rules it was built under

Nothing leaves the machine, and you can check

No account, no sync, no server of ours holding anything. The PDF engine underneath ships a usage reporting component switched on by default, so Endpaper switches it off before anything else touches the engine. We are telling you that rather than staying quiet, because you cannot check a promise nobody told you needed making. Help, What leaves this machine, reads the live state as you look at it.

Say so when it fails

Software that quietly does nothing is worse than software that refuses. Compression that makes a file bigger says so and tells you to keep the original. A signature that will not verify has its output deleted rather than handed back looking finished. A redaction that could not read part of a file names the part, because a clean result over unexamined bytes is worse than no result.

No noise

No adverts, no sponsored panels, no upgrade nagging, no watermark on free output, no countdown. The window shows your document and your tools.

The uncomfortable part, in public

We keep a defect list in the open, written by whoever found each one, with the cause and how it was found. It is not marketing. It exists because the alternative is a product whose faults are known only to the people who made it. Join the beta and you get that list with the build.

Who makes it

Alien Tech Services LLC, a small software company in Washington State. There is no venture money behind Endpaper and no growth target that would eventually require your files to pass through somebody's server. It is a tool, sold once, to people who need it to be boring and correct.