Bates numbering is a legal requirement with no room for interpretation: before a production goes to opposing counsel or the court, every page gets a unique sequential number, continuous across the whole set — file 1 ends at ABC-000231, file 2 starts at ABC-000232, no gaps, no duplicates.
The usual ways to do it are an Acrobat subscription, $99-and-up Windows-only desktop software, or uploading the whole set to a website. For documents under a protective order, the third one is not available.
BatesKit does it in the tab. pdf-lib parses and rewrites each PDF locally, one document at a time, writing finished files into a folder you pick. Originals are never touched. Every stamp is a real text object in a standard-14 font, so Ctrl+F finds it and a review platform indexes it.
Before the set ships, five read-only checks run on the same files, all on your device: metadata, redaction (dark regions, white/light covers, invisible ink), privileged or sensitive content, production QA (numbering gaps, duplicates, page geometry), and your index or privilege log reconciled against the assigned ranges.
A manifest CSV records relative path, filename, page count, BegBates, EndBates and the output SHA-256 per file, with a Summation-style load.dat alongside. No account, no subscription. Free for one file up to 25 pages; unlimited is $19 once, verified offline.
