About PDFtez

A free, privacy-first PDF toolkit built around one simple idea: most things you want to do with a PDF should never require you to upload your file to anyone.

Who builds this

PDFtez is an independent project — a small one-person operation, not a venture-backed startup. It's run from Australia and maintained on the side. There's no sales team, no growth hacker, no investor pressure to lock features behind a paywall. Just a maker who wanted PDF tools that don't ask for your email or upload your file when they don't need to.

Why it's free (and how it's funded)

There are no plans to add paywalls, watermarks, daily limits, or "premium" tiers. To keep all tools genuinely free, PDFtez is funded by unobtrusive display advertising via Google AdSense. The running costs of the site itself are small — Cloudflare's free tier handles the static hosting, a Cloudflare Worker proxies the few server-side tools, and CloudConvert's free quota covers the conversion engine. Ad revenue is what makes "free forever" sustainable rather than aspirational.

You will see standard display ads on tool pages. They are placed alongside the tool, never inside a file you uploaded, never inside the output, and never as deceptive download buttons. If an ad ever looks misleading, please let us know at hello@pdftez.com and we'll have it removed. The goal is to keep PDFtez accessible to everyone — students, small businesses, writers, lawyers, anyone who needs a PDF tool without having to sign up or pay.

How your files are handled

Sixteen of the 22 tools run entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your file never leaves your device — there's no upload, no temporary copy on a server, no possibility of leakage. These tools include Merge, Split, Rotate, Compress, Edit, Sign, Redact, Protect, Crop, Watermark, Page Numbers, Organize, Extract Text, N-up, JPG↔PDF, and others.

The six Office-format conversion tools (Word↔PDF, Excel↔PDF, PowerPoint↔PDF) genuinely need a server-side renderer (LibreOffice headless), so those route through a Cloudflare Worker to CloudConvert. Files are processed and auto-deleted after conversion. Both Cloudflare and CloudConvert are disclosed as sub-processors in the Privacy Policy.

Tools that upload your file are clearly labeled before you start.

What we track (and what we don't)

PDFtez uses standard web analytics to understand aggregate site traffic — things like how many people visited, which tools were used, and which referrers brought them in. We do not build user profiles, sell personal data, or share file contents with anyone for marketing purposes. The specific analytics provider and the cookies in use are listed in our Privacy Policy, which is the authoritative reference.

The site is funded by Google AdSense. AdSense and its partners may set cookies on your browser to serve ads and measure ad performance — disclosed in full in the Privacy Policy. You can opt out of personalised advertising at any time via Google's Ads Settings — ads will still appear, but will not be personalised based on your browsing history. Files you upload, drop, or process with PDFtez are never used for advertising and never shared with Google or any other third party for that purpose.

What's next

The roadmap is driven by what's actually useful, not what's novel. Currently in planning: OCR for scanned PDFs, PDF metadata editing, form field filling and flattening, Bates numbering, and PDF compare. Suggestions welcome.