Looking for a PDFpen replacement on Mac

PDFpen was a Smile app for years. Smile sold it to Nitro in 2021, and the line now ships as Nitro PDF Pro and Nitro PDF Pro Essentials. If you've landed here, you probably went looking for what happened to an app you already owned and liked.

First, the honest split

People used PDFpen for two quite different things, and only one of them is what PaperFind does:

• Editing PDFs — redaction, signatures, form filling, moving pages around, correcting text on the page. PaperFind does none of this. If that's what you used PDFpen for, you want a PDF editor, and this isn't one.
• OCR'ing scans so they become searchable — this part, PaperFind does, and it's the whole product.

If it was the OCR you needed

PaperFind turns scanned PDFs and images into searchable PDFs with an invisible text layer — the original scan looks untouched, but Cmd-F, text selection and Spotlight all start working. Then it searches across every document you've processed, so you can find a phrase without remembering which file it was in.

• On-device. OCR runs through Apple's built-in text recognition. Nothing is uploaded; it works with the network off.
• Your files stay files. Searchable PDFs are written back out as ordinary PDFs in ordinary folders — no library, no proprietary store, nothing to export later.
• $79/year with a perpetual fallback. After twelve paid months, the version you paid for keeps working whether or not you renew.

Why people go looking

The common thread in the threads we've read is ownership: someone bought an app once, the app changed hands, and the terms changed with it. We can't promise PaperFind will never change hands. What we can do is make the failure mode survivable — the perpetual fallback means a lapsed licence still runs, and the searchable PDFs it produced are plain files that don't need PaperFind to open.