PDF tools that never upload your file
Merge, split, reorder, rotate, crop and number PDFs. Everything runs in this page, so your document stays on your computer. No account, no daily limit, no size cap, no watermark.
What the alternatives limit
These figures are from the services' own published limits and pricing pages. They are the reason this site exists, and none of them is a criticism of the engineering — they are business decisions that follow from having a server in the middle.
| Service | Free tier limit | Your file |
|---|---|---|
| Smallpdf | About two documents a day, and the wall arrives at the download — after you have done the work | Uploaded, deleted after 1 hour |
| Sejda | 3 tasks an hour, 50 pages, 50 MB, one file per task | Uploaded, deleted after 2 hours |
| iLovePDF | 100 MB for merge; 15 MB and one file for conversions and OCR | Uploaded, deleted after 2 hours |
| PDF24 | No hard cap, funded by advertising | Uploaded — "merged in the cloud on our servers" |
| PDF Page Kit | None | Never leaves your browser |
The pattern worth noticing is the retention promise. "Deleted after one hour" is offered as reassurance, and it is also the clearest possible confirmation that a copy of your document existed on a machine you do not control. A site that cannot make that promise — because nothing ever arrives — is in a different category rather than a better tier of the same one.
You can check this yourself
Open your browser's developer tools before using any tool here, switch to the network panel, and watch. Merge two documents, reorder some pages, save the result. No request carries your file, because there is no endpoint on this site that would receive one.
That is a stronger form of evidence than a privacy policy, and it is available to anyone. It is also why this site is worth building even though the category is crowded: the claim is checkable in about thirty seconds.
What is not here
No optical character recognition, no conversion to Word or Excel, and no compression. Each needs substantially more machinery than belongs in a page, and a bad version would be worse than an absent one. Compression in particular is mostly lossy image downsampling wearing a neutral name — worth doing properly or not at all.