Do it now
Free for 20 files and 60 pages with every feature on, $19 once for unlimited. Runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari; nothing is uploaded.
Open the tool in any modern browser. There is nothing to install and no licence server to reach.
Drag in the PDFs and set the prefix, the padding and the start number.
Run it — one continuous sequence across the set, a manifest CSV, and optional .dat / .opt load files.
How it actually works
What Acrobat’s Bates tool does and does not do
Acrobat Pro numbers a set, supports a prefix and suffix, and lets you pick the digits and the start value. It is a real implementation and it works. Its limits are the ones that show up on the tenth production rather than the first: the output is a stamped set and nothing else — no manifest of what landed where, no hash per document, no Summation .dat or Opticon .opt load file — so if a review platform or the receiving side needs those, they are a separate manual step.
The other limit is where it lives. It is a per-seat subscription on an installed application, which means the work has to happen on a machine with the licence, and the cost recurs whether you produce documents monthly or twice a year.
What replacing it with a browser tool changes
Nothing needs to be installed, so the tool is available on whatever machine has the files — including one you do not administer. Because the PDFs are read and written in the tab by pdf-lib, they never leave the machine either, which removes the question of whether a cloud PDF service is an acceptable place for material under a protective order.
And the price stops recurring: $19 once, tied to a licence key, no subscription and no seat count. That is a smaller decision than adding an Acrobat Pro seat, which matters when the person deciding is also the person producing the documents.
The things you should confirm before switching
Two honest constraints. First, the ceiling is your browser’s memory: a set of tens or hundreds of ordinary documents is comfortable, a multi-gigabyte set is not, and an installed application handles that better. Second, this stamps, checks and reports — it does not edit PDFs. If your workflow also needs page-level editing, form work or true redaction (removing the content, not covering it), you still need something that does those.
What it does add on top of numbering: a metadata pass that surfaces the author name, original file path and revision history still inside each PDF, and a redaction pass that finds black bars with live text underneath. Those are the two failures that survive a perfectly numbered production.
Sequencing details that decide whether a production is defensible
One sequence across the whole set, with the digit padding kept so the numbers sort as text. A reserved round thousand at each document boundary when a document may grow before it is served. A declaration of the ranges consumed by earlier productions, so the run cannot reissue a number the other side already has. Placement measured against each page’s own crop box and rotation, so a rotated scan does not get its number in the margin the reader never sees.
Then the part that is hard to do by hand: every output is re-opened and the expected number is looked for on the pages that should carry it, and the manifest records source name, output name, page count, BegBates, EndBates and a SHA-256 per document.
Related
- Bates numbering software for a law firm that is not an e-discovery department
- How do I Bates stamp a batch of PDFs at once?
- Is there a free online Bates numbering tool that does not upload my files?
- How do I Bates number PDFs on a Mac?
- How do I add exhibit stickers to a PDF?
- How do I put a confidentiality stamp on a batch of PDFs?
Open the tool
Free for up to 20 files and 60 pages, with every feature enabled. $19 once for unlimited.