The parts nobody else does properly.
Three capabilities most e-signature tools don't have at all, and most PDF tools fake: redaction that actually destroys what it blacks out, personal-information detection built specifically for POPIA, and AI that reads a document instead of just displaying it. Real. Tested. Explained honestly below — including the parts that say no.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing uploaded.
9. Confidentiality
The parties agree that the settlement sum and the identity of the Second Party (SA ID 8501015800086) shall remain strictly confidential.
- Inherited page dictionaries
- Tiling patterns
- Type3 glyph procedures
- Soft masks
Redaction that actually redacts.
Most redaction tools — including well-known, expensive ones — draw a black rectangle over the text and call it done. The words are still underneath: recoverable by anyone who selects the "blacked-out" area, copies it, or opens the raw PDF stream. KuduDoc did exactly this too, until 3 August 2026.
Failed redaction isn't a rare accident. It's a recurring, newsworthy category of leak — courts, governments and law firms have all published documents whose blacked-out text turned out to be trivially recoverable, because a black rectangle is a drawing instruction, not a deletion.
Almost nobody can honestly claim destructive redaction with a published test suite behind it. We can.
Settlement-Agreement.pdf — clause 9
…the identity of the Second Party (SA ID 8501015800086) shall remain strictly confidential…
Select the black bar, then copy it, and the clipboard holds:
8501015800086
✕ Recovered — redaction failedSettlement-Agreement.pdf — clause 9
…the identity of the Second Party (SA ID 8501015800086) shall remain strictly confidential…
Select the black bar, then copy it, and the clipboard holds:
(nothing — the characters were deleted)
✓ Nothing to recoverAn illustrative mock-up of both outcomes — not a live document upload. The ID number is invented for this demo.
A written guarantee spells out exactly what this fix covers — no marketing gloss, just the precise scope of 15 named attack techniques. That's the honest claim: tested against everything we know to test for, not a claim that nothing else is possible.
It finds the personal information for you.
Ask most redaction software to help with POPIA and you get a regular-expression pass over emails and phone numbers. KuduDoc's detector is built for South African documents specifically, and it checks five categories: SA ID numbers (validated against the official check digit, not just any thirteen digits in a row), bank account numbers (digit runs that sit next to banking words), street addresses, phone numbers in SA formats, and email addresses. All five run in your browser — the document never leaves your device.
And here is the part most vendors leave out. Five categories is the whole list. Passport numbers, tax reference numbers, company registration numbers, credit card numbers and standalone postal codes are not checked — POPIA names them, and we don't detect them yet. Street addresses are found by their suffix (Street, Road, Avenue and similar), so an address written without one is missed too. If your document might carry any of those, read it yourself before you rely on this scan.
The pitch isn't "redact a PDF." It's "show me the personal information in this document that POPIA cares about — and remove it, properly." For an HR file, a medical record, or a discovery bundle, that's a compliance tool, not a PDF feature — as long as you know exactly which categories it covers.
To: HR file — P. Moloi
Re: Onboarding & travel record
Employee Palesa Moloi (SA ID 8402155009087) completed onboarding on 14 July. Passport A03145678 was recorded for the upcoming Maputo site visit. Tax reference number 9012345678 is on file with payroll.
Contact: 082 555 0199 (cell) or 011 555 0142 (office); palesa.moloi@example.co.za (work) and p.moloi83@example.com (personal, for the medical-aid dependants form).
Residential address: 14 Jacaranda Street, Sunninghill, Johannesburg, 2157.
Salary is paid to bank account 1049228833. Relocation costs were charged to company credit card 4539 1122 3344 5566.
Employer of record: Highveld Logistics (Pty) Ltd, company registration 2019/123456/07.
An illustrative sample document, not a real employee file — every value here is invented for this demo. Click "Scan for POPIA data," then filter by category.
Watch what stays unhighlighted. The passport number, tax reference, credit card, company registration and the standalone postal code are all still sitting in that sample document after the scan, because the detector doesn't check for them. We left them in rather than tidying them out of the demo — that gap is the honest picture of what a scan does and doesn't do for you today, and a richer detector is on the list.
Reading, not just rendering.
Most PDF tools stop at pixels. KuduDoc's AI layer reads what's actually in the document — pull out a clause, summarise a page, ask it a direct question, work out where a signature belongs on a scanned page, or flag whether a document is even fit to sign electronically in the first place.
Extracted clauses
Clause 4.2 — Termination
20 business days' written notice required by either party.
Clause 7.1 — Confidentiality
Survives termination indefinitely.
Clause 11.3 — Interest
Overdue amounts accrue at prime plus 2%.
Summary — Residential-Lease-Agreement.pdf
- 12-month fixed term, renews month-to-month unless either party gives 20 business days' notice.
- Rent escalates 8% annually on the anniversary of the start date.
- Tenant covers municipal accounts; landlord covers structural maintenance.
Ask a question
Scanned-page analysis
Auto-placed via vision model ✓
Surety-Agreement-Draft.pdf
No witness signature line detected. South African suretyships typically require one — flagged before you send it, not after.
Said plainly, not apologetically: AI features need a model to run against — a local one or a hosted provider. No model configured, no fake result — KuduDoc returns a clean 503 instead of pretending. And because sending document text to a third-party provider is a real privacy decision, any AI feature that does it is disclosed in the privacy policy and switchable off per account.
Why does your SARS return only open in Adobe?
Why government PDFs only open in Adobe
SARS eFiling returns — and plenty of other government forms — aren't ordinary PDFs. They're XFA forms: a dynamic XML form format Adobe built into LiveCycle. Open one in Preview, Chrome, Edge, or almost any viewer except Adobe Reader, and you get the grey page every South African taxpayer has learned to dread.
The result: every South African taxpayer and every business filing a return is forced to install Adobe Acrobat Reader just to see a document their own government sent them. It's genuine, widespread, thoroughly annoying friction — and it's searched for constantly.
The fix — honestly scoped
NewWe've built a "Convert to standard PDF" flow: it paints each page of an XFA form to a high-DPI canvas and reassembles an ordinary PDF that opens anywhere — built on pdf.js, nowhere near the mupdf engine that can't read XFA at all.
It's a recent build, and we're rolling it out carefully rather than overclaiming. pdf.js's XFA support is still formally experimental, and SARS forms are some of the most complex dynamic forms in circulation. So here's the exact scope: this lets you view, convert and print an XFA form. It does not fill in or submit one — that's a different, harder claim, and we're not making it yet.
Document intelligence isn't a footnote here.
Redaction that destroys, not hides. Detection tuned for South African documents, with the five categories it checks named out loud and the ones it doesn't named too. AI that reads the document, honestly scoped about when it can't. Included on every plan.
Personal plan available · Made in South Africa · POPIA-minded