This is a direct list of what PDF Go actually does today, grouped by category, with which tier each feature needs. No hypothetical roadmap items — just what's shipped.
Markup and annotation (on-device, free tier)
- Highlight, underline, and strikethrough selected text.
- Draw freehand with the ink tool.
- Add sticky notes and free-standing text boxes.
- Erase existing annotations (whole-stroke or precise partial erase).
- Edit existing text in place, directly on the page.
All of this runs entirely on your Mac — no upload, no connection required.
Shapes, forms, and redaction (on-device, requires subscription/license)
- Draw rectangles, ovals, and lines, with adjustable color and line width.
- Place fillable form fields (text fields and checkboxes) directly onto a page.
- Redact content — draws a permanent black box over the selected area and actually removes the underlying content, not just a visual overlay.
- Add a signature (drawn or from a saved image) anywhere on a page.
Page management (on-device, requires subscription/license)
- Reorder, delete, and extract specific pages.
- Merge multiple PDFs into one document, or split one document into separate files.
- Compress a PDF to reduce file size, with a quality setting.
- Remove a password from a protected PDF you have legitimate access to.
- Read and edit a document's bookmarks/outline.
- Apply a text watermark across pages.
OCR (on-device, requires subscription/license)
Scanned PDFs — photographed or scanned pages with no underlying text — get processed with on-device OCR (Apple's Vision framework) to add a searchable, selectable text layer, without uploading the scan anywhere for that step. See How OCR Works for the actual mechanics.
AI chat, summarization, and semantic search (server-processed)
- Ask questions about an open document and get answers referencing specific pages.
- Get a summary of a document, including long ones, using the chunking approach described in How to Summarize Large PDFs.
- Semantic search across a document's content by meaning, not just exact keyword match — see How to Search PDFs Instantly.
Adding a document to AI-powered search extracts its text and computes the search index (embeddings) on-device, then uploads a copy of the document and that index to PDF Go's server so it can be retrieved from and answered against later — that retrieval-and-answer step is server-side, the same requirement any AI-PDF tool has (see How AI Understands PDFs for why). The free tier includes a limited number of AI questions per week; the paid tier includes a much larger daily allowance and access to a higher-capability model mode for harder questions.
Pricing, plainly
| Tier | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Viewing, highlighting/drawing/erasing, limited weekly AI questions |
| Monthly | $9.99/mo, 14-day free trial | Everything, including shapes/forms/redaction/signing, OCR, semantic search, full daily AI allowance |
| Lifetime | $40 one-time | Same as monthly, no recurring charge, all future updates included |
What PDF Go doesn't do
Being direct about the boundaries: PDF Go is a Mac-native app, not a cross-platform or web tool — there's no Windows, iOS, or browser version. It's focused on reading, marking up, and understanding PDFs, not a general document editor for creating files from scratch. And as covered above, the AI features specifically require a connection and server-side processing — they're not part of the fully-offline, on-device set of features.