ShadowClip vs CumulusVPN
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
ShadowClip
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You share screenshots with colleagues and paste them into AI tools every day. ShadowClip removes the personal data before you hit send. Email addresses in a complaint. Names and faces. API keys. They end up in screenshots constantly, and then in places they shouldn't — AI assistants, emails to colleagues, or texts to friends. ShadowClip autodetects sensitive information in images, and lets you review and adjust before sharing. WHAT IT DETECTS • Credentials: API keys and tokens in more than 20 formats • Financial: credit card numbers and IBANs, each checked against its own check digit, so a number that merely looks like a card isn't flagged • Identity: national ID numbers for 29 countries, each matched to its own format • Contact: email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses • Network: IPv4, IPv6 and MAC addresses • Visual: faces, QR codes, barcodes • Names, organisations and locations • Dates of birth and handwritten signatures BUILT INTO YOUR WORKFLOW Pick a photo from your library and give ShadowClip a few seconds. Findings appear as a review list: accept, dismiss, or add your own. Then save the redacted copy back to Photos. You can also select words by hand, or draw a region over anything else you want hidden. Share Extension: from Photos, Safari, or any app with the system Share menu, choose ShadowClip. Redact and save without leaving what you're doing. BUILT FOR EVERY LANGUAGE Most redaction tools are built for English. ShadowClip's interface is available in 17 languages, and it checks text in 30 — including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian and Thai. National ID numbers are matched country by country, not with one generic pattern. Arabic and Hebrew get a fully right-to-left interface. Apple's text recognition cannot read Hebrew, Greek or Hindi. Rather than pass over it silently, ShadowClip marks that text on the image so you can see exactly what went unchecked — and numbers, email addresses and ID numbers inside it are still found. IRREVERSIBLE BY DESIGN Redactions are opaque fills composited into a new image. The original pixels are discarded, not covered: there is nothing underneath to recover. Location data and camera metadata are stripped when you save. PRIVACY BY DESIGN ShadowClip contains no networking code and makes no network requests. Your images are processed on your device and never leave it. No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.
CumulusVPN
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CumulusVPN is a decentralized VPN that respects your privacy by design — not by promise. NO ACCOUNT, EVER There is no sign-up, no email, no password, no phone number. Open the app and it generates a private key on your device. That key is your only identity, and it never leaves your phone. NO LOGS, AND WE MEAN IT We do not record the sites you visit, your DNS queries, your traffic, or your connection history. Our servers keep the minimum routing state in memory only — it is erased when the server restarts. There is no activity database to leak, sell, or hand over, because it does not exist. ONE TAP TO CONNECT Pick a country, tap connect. Modern WireGuard® encryption protects your traffic on public Wi-Fi, hotels, airports, and untrusted networks. Fast handshakes, automatic reconnection, and gateway failover keep you online. FREE TIER FOREVER Every install includes a genuinely free tier — no trial, no card, no account. RUN ON A DECENTRALIZED NETWORK CumulusVPN servers run as apps on the Flux decentralized cloud, hosted in commercial datacenters by independent operators — not on a single company's servers. It is a different, more resilient shape for a VPN. OPTIONAL MULTI-HOP FOR MAXIMUM PRIVACY Turn on multi-hop and your traffic is routed through two servers, so that no single server ever sees both who you are and where you are going. It is slower — we tell you exactly how much — and it is your choice, off by default. HONEST ABOUT WHAT A VPN CAN AND CANNOT DO CumulusVPN protects you from local-network snooping, ISP logging, and geo-restrictions. It is not anonymity software like Tor, and we say so plainly. No overselling. Built by the Flux team. Powered by Flux Cloud. Privacy that is structural, not a slogan. WireGuard is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: CumulusVPN at Free against ShadowClip's $2.99. CumulusVPN also leads on update cadence (every 4 weeks vs every 2 months) and iOS requirement (15.1 vs 17.0). On ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
CumulusVPN is free to download; ShadowClip costs $2.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
ShadowClip ships an update every 2 months, CumulusVPN every 4 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 19, 2026 and October 11, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | ShadowClip | CumulusVPN |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $2.99 | Free — better |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Every 4 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.1 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 5 MB | 40 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Alexander Hepburn | Influx Technologies Limited |
In-app purchases
ShadowClip
No in-app purchases
CumulusVPN
No in-app purchases









