PDFUnlock vs LostMyPass — honest comparison

LostMyPass is the best-known PDF password recovery service. It has been around since 2015 and does a perfectly reasonable job. So why build another one?

Short answer: language parity and transparency about the cracker.

Language parity

LostMyPass is English-only. That’s fine if English is your first language, but the people who actually lose PDF passwords are just as often French, Spanish or German speakers. PDFUnlock ships a fully native experience in all four languages: the site, the dashboard, the error messages, the emails, even the support replies.

Transparency about what we actually do

Most online “PDF unlockers” are vague about what happens after you click upload. We don’t think the details should be a secret. Here is the exact pipeline a paid job goes through:

1. Quick test (free): the 1 000 most common passwords. About a third of real-world jobs are solved at this stage.
2. Rockyou: the 14 M leaked-password dictionary. Most successes come from here when the quick test fails.
3. Rockyou + best64.rule: common mangling rules on top of rockyou (@ for a, capital on the first letter, digit suffix, etc.).
4. Rockyou + OneRuleToRuleThemAll: a much more aggressive rule set.
5. Brute force masked (?a?a?a?a..., incremental): tries every printable character combination up to 8 characters. This is where random short passwords get cracked.

All of this runs on hashcat on dedicated GPUs. No cloud magic, no machine learning, no proprietary secret sauce — just decades-old, well-understood cryptanalysis.

Pricing

Both services charge only on success. Our prices per file are:

• Owner removal: free
• RC4-40 / RC4-128 / AES-128: 9–19 €
• AES-256: 29 €

That’s roughly in line with LostMyPass. The real difference is what you get for that price: a full PDF invoice (INTEK CENTER SASU, French VAT), email notifications in your language, a dashboard with your order history, and the option to request a refund through a normal human support channel if the recovered password doesn’t work.

Success rate

We don’t promise miracles. AES-256 with a genuinely random 12-character password is out of reach for anyone, including us. We publish our honest estimate on every job before you start, and we only charge you if the password actually opens the file.

When to pick which

Pick LostMyPass if you only read English and you already trust their brand. Pick PDFUnlock if you want native-language support, a clear invoice for your accounting, or the exact same product in French, Spanish or German.

Either way, you’ll get the same underlying technology — hashcat on GPUs — because that’s the only thing that works.