Predicting costs in eDiscovery is notoriously difficult. Clients want a firm number before you begin processing. Vendors need an exact page count to generate an accurate quote. If you guess wrong, someone loses money.

The old way of quoting

For years, legal support teams relied on average page counts. They would look at the total file size of a folder in gigabytes. Then they would multiply that by a rough conversion number. Maybe they assumed thirty pages per megabyte.

This method is deeply flawed. A megabyte of uncompressed TIFF images might be one page. A megabyte of a dense text PDF might be a hundred pages. File size tells you nothing about the actual volume of work.

If you rely on gigabyte math, you will either overcharge your client or undercharge for your labor. Neither outcome is good for business.

Getting an exact page count

The only way to build an accurate quote is to count the actual pages. You need to know exactly how many pages exist in the entire dataset. If you still need the folder-level workflow itself, our guide to counting pages across a folder of PDFs on Windows walks through it.

This sounds simple. But when a client hands you a hard drive with eighty thousand mixed files, it becomes an operational problem. You have PDFs mixed with office documents and image files, all with different counting rules.

You cannot open them one by one. You also cannot upload them to a free web tool because of confidentiality rules. We cover those browser-based risks in more detail in our article on why legal teams avoid cloud document counting.

Automating the count locally

We created FileTally to solve this specific problem. It is a Windows desktop utility installed from a single Windows installer and it stays on your machine.

You plug in the client hard drive and point FileTally at the main folder. It walks through every subfolder. It identifies the PDFs and the Office documents and the images.

You set the rules. You can tell FileTally to treat every JPEG as a single page. You can tell it to skip ZIP files.

It runs locally. Your client data never touches the internet. This keeps you compliant with strict privacy requirements.

Exporting the estimate

When the scan finishes, you click a button to export a spreadsheet. You get a complete inventory of the dataset.

You can easily sum the total page count in Excel. You can see exactly which files are corrupted or unsupported. You can build your quote based on hard data.

If you need the count before you price the work, FileTally gives you a local Windows workflow and a spreadsheet you can hand to the next person in the process.

If you are weighing Acrobat, scripts, and local tools before you choose a workflow, our 2026 comparison of page counter software for legal teams lays out the tradeoffs.