Question 1

What does 'without uploading' actually mean?

Accepted Answer

It means your PDF file bytes never leave your device. All parsing, modification, conversion, and export happens in your browser on your CPU. The 'upload' HTTP request that most online tools make — where the entire file goes over the wire to a remote server — simply doesn't exist here. You can verify this in DevTools → Network: no multipart/form-data, no file payloads.

Question 2

Which tools in the suite are fully client-side?

Accepted Answer

Convert (to JPG, PNG, Word, Excel, text), compress, merge, split, edit, annotate, and sign are all fully client-side. AI Chat and AI Translate are the only tools that necessarily send data — and even they send only extracted text, never your raw PDF bytes. That distinction is called out in each tool's UI.

Question 3

How do I verify nothing is being uploaded?

Accepted Answer

Open Chrome or Firefox DevTools (F12), go to the Network tab, pick any non-AI tool, and run a full operation. You'll see the initial page load, then zero requests with your file as the body. Filter by 'Fetch/XHR' or sort by payload size — no multipart/form-data entries appear. This is the simplest, most honest proof we can offer.

Question 4

Is there a file size limit?

Accepted Answer

Only your browser's memory limit, not an artificial server-side cap. In practice, Chromium-based browsers handle PDFs up to around 500 MB comfortably on modern laptops; smaller PDFs (under 50 MB) process nearly instantly. Because there's no server, there's no per-upload quota or bandwidth limit — batch-processing 100 files is the same as processing one.

Question 5

Does the free tier have watermarks or limits?

Accepted Answer

No watermarks on any output, at any tier, ever. The free tier gives you unlimited client-side operations (convert, compress, merge, split, edit, annotate, sign). Paid tiers only unlock quota on AI-powered features (Chat, Translate) and advanced AI-cleanup modes — because those cost money on our side. Local processing has no marginal cost, so there's nothing to meter.

Question 6

Is this safer than 'privacy-first' online converters that claim to delete files?

Accepted Answer

Yes, because the safety is structural rather than policy-based. 'We delete files after an hour' requires you to trust their servers, logs, backups, sub-processors, and data-retention review. A tool that never receives the file has nothing to delete, nothing to accidentally keep, and nothing to leak in a breach. Provability beats promise.

Question 7

Does it work offline?

Accepted Answer

Yes — once any tool page has loaded once, the conversion, compress, merge, split, edit, and export flows all run offline. Switch to airplane mode after loading, and everything still works. Only the initial page load and the AI features require a connection. See our offline converter page for the detailed offline story.

Question 8

Can I use this at work on a managed laptop?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Because there's no file upload, DLP (data loss prevention) policies watching for uploads see nothing. Because there's no install, endpoint-protection tools that block .exe installers don't care. IT security teams generally prefer browser-based tools to downloaded converters precisely because the attack surface is smaller and behavior is verifiable.

Question 9

How is this different from 'no account required' tools?

Accepted Answer

'No account required' just means you don't sign in — your file still gets uploaded to their server, it just isn't associated with a username. 'Without uploading' is the stronger claim: the file never reaches any server. You get both here: no account required AND no upload, for all client-side tools.

Question 10

What libraries power the client-side processing?

Accepted Answer

PDF parsing: PDF.js (Mozilla, open source). PDF rebuild / modification: pdf-lib (MIT). Image encoding: native browser canvas APIs. .docx generation: the docx library (MIT). .xlsx generation: SheetJS. OCR for scanned documents: Tesseract.js. All of these are open-source, audited, and run in your browser — not on any server of ours.

Question 11

Is there a desktop or mobile app?

Accepted Answer

No, and that's intentional. A browser tab is already portable across every device (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, iOS, Android) and requires zero install or admin rights. You can 'install' the page as a PWA from Chrome/Edge for a dedicated window — but that's a shortcut, not a separate app.

Question 12

Can I use this for signed NDAs, medical records, legal docs?

Accepted Answer

Yes — this is precisely the use case most online tools can't cleanly serve. Because your file never leaves your device, you're not sharing anything with a third party, which eliminates most vendor-risk review concerns (GDPR processor language, BAAs, SOC 2 boundary scoping, etc.). Many legal and healthcare users pick client-side tools specifically to avoid that review entirely.

Question 13

What happens when I close the tab?

Accepted Answer

The file, the working state, and everything in memory is released. Nothing is written to disk outside of what you explicitly save (the converted output, if any). There is no background daemon, no history log on any server, and no 'recent files' list synced anywhere. Your PDF was never in any of those systems because those systems don't exist.

Question 14

Do the AI features work without uploading?

Accepted Answer

AI Chat and AI Translate necessarily send data to a language-model endpoint — but they extract text in your browser first and only send the text, not your raw PDF bytes. Your original file is never transmitted. This is clearly labeled in the AI tools so you can decide per-operation whether it's acceptable for your document.

Question 15

Can I self-host or audit the code?

Accepted Answer

The client-side code is visible in DevTools → Sources on any tool page — a security-review team can read the conversion code that runs in your browser. The underlying libraries (PDF.js, pdf-lib, docx, SheetJS, Tesseract.js) are all open-source with public repositories. A formal self-host offering for enterprise deployments is on our roadmap.

Question 16

Why build it this way — isn't server-side faster?

Accepted Answer

Server-side can be marginally faster for very large files, but the round-trip cost (upload + process + download) usually wipes out that gain. More importantly: users increasingly understand that 'fast' isn't worth 'my file is on someone else's server.' Client-side is the right trade-off for the overwhelming majority of PDF workflows.

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