I merge PDFs maybe twice a month. Split one occasionally. Compress one when Gmail complains it's too big.
For this, my options were:
- Adobe Acrobat — a monthly subscription, for something I do twice a month.
- "Free" online tools — plastered with ads, capped at 2 tasks a day unless you pay, and who knows where your files go.
- A desktop app from 2009 — you know the one.
None of these felt right, so I built the thing I actually wanted: PDF Toolbox.
What it does: merge, split, compress, plus Word / PPT / Excel → PDF. Six tools, that's it. No editor, no e-sign, no "AI-powered" anything — the boring stuff, done well.
How it's priced: no subscription. You buy credits, they never expire. Use 3 this month and 0 the next — you pay nothing in between. First 3 conversions are free, no account needed. Files auto-delete after 2 days (it's a toolbox, not a storage service).
Why pay-per-use? Honestly, this is the experiment. Subscriptions are great for the vendor and terrible for the twice-a-month user. Ad-supported "free" means you're the product and your PDFs are training data. Credits felt like the honest middle: you pay for exactly what you use, nothing else.
The part I'm still unsure about: do people actually want this, or does everyone just expect PDF tools to be free? I've watched too many indie makers (myself included) build something reasonable and discover the market's answer is "cool, but I'd rather watch ads."
So here's my ask: try the 3 free conversions, and tell me straight — would you ever pay per use for this, or is PDF tooling a race to free that nobody wins?
Top comments (1)
To your actual question: yes, I'd much rather buy a handful of credits than carry another subscription for something I touch twice a month. I'd make the "first 3 conversions, no account" part louder, since that's exactly the step most "free" tools hide behind a signup.
One thing worth fixing before you share it around more. Testing is my day job (I'm a Staff SDET), so I pointed my usual site checks at it, and it came out 89/100 (B). The top flag: none of the pages carry Open Graph tags. The homepage, pricing and every tool page have a good title and meta description, but no og:title, og:description or og:image, so when someone pastes the link into Slack, X, LinkedIn or iMessage the preview is a bare URL or whatever the platform guesses. For a product that grows by people passing links around, that card is basically your ad. Adding the og tags to the shared layout (reusing the title and description you already have) plus one share image would cover every page at once.
There were 9 other warnings in the same run, mainly SEO tweaks and the DNS records behind email.