About this site

Who runs this

My name is Santosh Khatiwada. I am an independent software developer based in Nepal. Most of my work is not this site — it is custom business software, mainly payroll and accounting systems for non-profit organisations and small businesses, where I handle everything from the database design to the desktop application people actually use.

I have been writing software professionally for several years, working with organisations that need systems built around real regulatory requirements: Nepali income tax bands, social security contributions, fiscal-year reporting that has to reconcile with what an auditor expects to see. It is unglamorous work and it teaches you that the difference between software people tolerate and software people rely on is almost entirely in the details nobody demos.

I also build mobile applications with Flutter, and I maintain this site in the time between client projects. There is no company behind it, no team, and no investor. If something here is broken, I am the person who fixes it.

Why these tools exist

They came out of a recurring annoyance in the client work. Preparing document packs for submission — registration papers, audit files, grant applications — meant merging, splitting, rotating and compressing PDFs constantly. The available options were all unsatisfying in the same way.

Desktop PDF software was priced for enterprises and licensed per seat, which is difficult to justify for an occasional task. The free online tools all wanted me to upload documents — frequently client documents containing salary data, bank details and identity information — to servers in other countries, run by companies I knew nothing about, under privacy policies that reserved more rights than their homepages implied.

Neither felt right. Uploading a client's payroll file to a free converter is not something I was willing to do, and telling a client I had done so is not a conversation I wanted to have.

Meanwhile, browsers had quietly become capable of the work. Two mature open-source libraries — pdf-lib for reading and writing PDF structure, and PDF.js, the engine Mozilla built for Firefox's PDF viewer, for rendering — make it entirely practical to do this in a browser tab. Nothing needs to be uploaded. So I built the tools I wanted, and then kept building them as people asked for more.

What "runs in your browser" actually means

When you drop a file onto a tool here, it is read into your own browser's memory using the standard file API. The processing happens on your processor. The finished file is created locally and handed back to you through a download link. At no point is your document transmitted anywhere.

This is not a promise you have to take on trust, and you should not take it on trust. There are two ways to verify it in under a minute:

• The network test. Press F12 to open your browser's developer tools, select the Network tab, and process a file. An upload would appear as a request carrying megabytes of data. You will not see one.
• The offline test. Load any tool page, then disconnect from the internet entirely. Process your file. It still works — because nothing was ever going anywhere.

The practical consequences are worth spelling out. There is no upload wait, which is why large files are fast. There is no queue at busy times, because there is no shared server to queue for. There is no file size limit beyond your own device's memory. And there is no retention policy to trust, because no copy of your document exists anywhere except on your computer.

How the site is funded

This site carries advertising. That is the entire business model, and I would rather say so plainly than bury it.

Because nothing is processed on a server, running this site is genuinely inexpensive — it is static files on ordinary hosting. That is what makes it possible to offer every tool free, with no page limits, no watermarks, no daily quota and no account. There is no premium tier, no "upgrade to remove the watermark", and no feature held back behind a sign-up form.

I will not be adding any of those things. A tool that works completely or not at all is easier to trust, and the moment a free tool starts negotiating with you about what it will do is the moment it stops being useful.

What is not here, and why

A few things people ask for are deliberately absent.

PDF to Word conversion. Doing this properly means reconstructing paragraphs, styles and tables from absolutely positioned text fragments, and every browser-based attempt I have tested produces output that takes longer to clean up than retyping would. Rather than ship something disappointing, the honest options are extracting the text or using desktop software built for it.

Password protection and removal. PDF encryption is not supported by the library this site is built on. And a tool advertising that it can "unlock" a PDF without its password would be either dishonest about what it does or something I have no interest in providing. To protect a document, use the export options in your PDF reader, which write proper encryption.

OCR — recognising text inside a scanned image — is genuinely possible in a browser and is the most requested addition. It is on the list.

Corrections and requests

The tool list has grown almost entirely from people writing to me. If something is broken, if a tool produces a file your reader will not open, if an article here contains an error, or if there is an obvious gap, I would genuinely like to know.

The fastest way to reach me is the contact page. If you are reporting a bug, telling me your browser and roughly what the file was like — how many pages, scanned or digital, roughly what size — makes it far more likely I can reproduce and fix it.

Editorial approach

Everything written on this site — the tool pages, the guides, this page — is written by me from direct experience of the problem. Where I do not know something, I say so. Where a tool has a real limitation, it is stated on the tool's own page rather than discovered afterwards: the compressor tells you that strong compression destroys the text layer, the signing tool explains the difference between an electronic and a digital signature, and the watermark tool says plainly that a watermark can be removed by anyone with a proper editor.

That is a deliberate choice. A tool that overstates what it does saves you thirty seconds and costs you an afternoon.