About PDF.Capital

PDF.Capital is a free online PDF toolkit. It is built and maintained by a small independent team of web developers who spent too many years watching colleagues email documents to strangers' servers just to rotate a page.

The site launched because the free PDF tools we kept recommending all had the same shape: upload your file, wait, accept a watermark, hit a two-tasks-per-hour wall, or create an account. Meanwhile browsers had quietly become capable of doing the same work locally. We built the toolkit that assumption implies.

What we actually do

Every tool published on this site runs inside your browser tab. Your document is read into memory by the browser, modified there, and handed back to you as a download. It is not uploaded, not queued on a server, not stored, and not seen by us — there is no infrastructure on our side that ever touches it. If you disconnect from the internet after the page loads, the tools keep working.

The technical detail behind that claim is written up on our How it works page, including the parts where the approach has real limits.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not publish a tool that does not work. Several conversions people ask for — PDF to Word, optical character recognition on scans, certified PDF/A output — need engines that are not practical to run in a browser today. Other sites list them anyway and hand you a degraded result. We leave them off the catalogue until we can do them properly, which is why our tool count is smaller than some competitors' and why every page in it does what its title says.

We also do not require an account, do not ask for an email address, do not watermark your output, and do not meter how many files you process in an hour.

How the site is funded

Advertising, and nothing else. Because there are no conversion servers, our running costs are close to a static site's, and ads cover them. Ads are labelled, kept out of the tool interface, and are not loaded at all until you accept cookies — decline and every tool still works identically. There is no premium tier and no upsell inside the tools. Our Pricing page explains the economics in full.

We collect anonymous usage counts — which tool ran, whether it succeeded, roughly how long it took — so we know what to fix. That record never contains your file, its name or its contents. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is stored and for how long.

Editorial standards

The guides in our blog are written by the same people who build the tools, tested against the current versions of the software they describe, and revised when something changes. Comparison pages name what competitors do better as well as worse, because a comparison that only flatters us is not worth reading. When we get something wrong, we correct the page rather than quietly deleting it.

Getting in touch

Bug reports, feature requests, corrections to a guide and press enquiries all go through the contact page, and a person reads them. If a tool fails on a specific document, telling us what the file was produced by is usually enough for us to reproduce it — please do not send us the document itself.

PDF.Capital is operated as an independent web project and is not affiliated with Adobe, Google, or any of the services discussed on our comparison pages. Adobe, Acrobat and PDF-related trademarks belong to their respective owners.