I Run 47 PDF Tools for $0/Month — Here's the Exact Stack

People assume running a 47-tool web app costs hundreds per month. Mine costs $0. Here's the exact stack and why each piece is free.

The Stack

Layer	Service	Cost
Hosting	Cloudflare Pages	$0
AI Backend	Cloudflare Workers	$0
AI Model	Gemini API (free tier)	$0
Analytics	Cloudflare Web Analytics	$0
Search indexing	IndexNow + Sitemap	$0
Total		$0/mo

Why It Works

1. Static hosting is enough. All 47 tools run client-side JavaScript. There's no server rendering, no database queries. Cloudflare Pages serves static files from 300+ edge locations — free.

2. PDF processing happens in the browser. Libraries like pdf.js, pdf-lib, and Tesseract.js (OCR) run entirely client-side. A 50MB PDF gets processed without touching my server.

3. The AI Worker is tiny. One Cloudflare Worker (~200 lines) proxies requests to Gemini. Workers free tier: 100,000 requests/day. My site does a fraction of that.

4. No user accounts = no database. No auth, no sessions, no user data to store. This eliminates the biggest cost center for most apps.

The Trade-offs

• No server-side processing means large files depend on the user's device
• Free AI tier has rate limits (I added IP-based throttling)
• No database means no saved history or cross-device sync

For a free tools site, these trade-offs are invisible to users.

The Numbers

• 47 tools, 124 pages
• ~120KB initial page load (homepage)
• Global CDN, <100ms TTFB in most regions
• $0/month total infrastructure cost

Try It

https://pdfwordtools.pages.dev — 47 free PDF tools, no signup.

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Building in public. Next: how I got 124 pages indexed in 24 hours.