I built free PDF tools that never upload your files

PDF Utils — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:15:57 +0000

A while ago I needed to merge two PDFs. Every free site I found worked the same way: upload your file to someone's server, wait, download it back. My files had personal stuff in them, so I closed the tab and wrote a little script for myself instead.

That script slowly turned into PDF Utils (https://yourpdfutils.com). It's a bunch of PDF tools that run entirely in your browser. Merge, split, compress, sign, rotate, pull pages out, convert images, that sort of thing. When you drop a file in, JavaScript on your own machine does the work and saves the result to your downloads. The file never leaves your device. Not "encrypted in transit", it just never goes anywhere. Once the page loads you could even go offline and it would still work.

There's no signup because there's nothing an account would be for. No upload queue or watermark or any of that. The site is free and shows ads, which is how it pays for itself. Hosting is basically static files, so it costs me very little to keep it that way.

The honest downside: your device does all the work, so a big file on an old phone can be slow. And there's no OCR yet, because the language models are too heavy to ship to a browser tab without making everything miserable. I'd rather keep the "your file never leaves" promise than add features that quietly break it.

If you try it and something feels off, tell me. I read the mail.

DEV Community: PDF Utils

I built free PDF tools that never upload your files