A free, unlimited online PDF converter with Privacy focus | Hacker News Reader

A free, unlimited online PDF converter with Privacy focus

quicklypdf.com

33 pointsnicbars45 comments

This is a side project I started nearly 2 months ago: an online PDF converter at https://quicklypdf.com. Over time, I’ve made various improvements, but I’m still looking for feedback and new users.

I’m aware there are many similar tools (e.g., smallpdf, ilovepdf) and competition is tough, but here’s what makes https://quicklypdf.com stand out:

1. Simplicity: No email sign-up, no user account needed. Just upload and convert.

2. Unlimited and Free: Unlike some services that require subscriptions or have daily limits, https://quicklypdf.com allows unlimited conversions, 100% free of charge.

3. High-Quality Output: Despite being free and straightforward, the conversion quality is intended to match or exceed that of paid alternatives.

4. Privacy-Focused: Uploaded files are deleted from the server within one hour for privacy. Additionally, certain features (like PDF merging or converting images to PDF) run locally in your browser—no upload needed—so you can even use them offline once the page is loaded.

I’d love any suggestions or feedback you might have. If you need an online PDF converter, please give https://quicklypdf.com a try. Thank you!

This looks pretty good, great job!

How are you making profit from this so that it’s sustainable?

Thanks for the kind words! Right now I’m focusing on building a solid user base and refining the service. I don’t have direct monetization in place yet, but I’m exploring options like optional premium features or light, non-intrusive ads later on. The main goal is to keep it genuinely free and sustainable long-term.

I haven't tried it yet, but what advantage does this have over pandoc?

Pandoc is awesome for converting text-based formats and markup files, but from my knowledge it doesn’t cover some of the more specialized PDF operations (like merging, splitting, rotating pages, etc.) or handling complex office formats with embedded elements. My tool aims to provide a quick, browser-based way to handle all those PDF tasks—no installation or command-line usage required.

I see, thank you!

How do you handle complex office formats with embedded elements? Do you reimplement ODT and other standards?

Thanks for asking! I don’t reimplement those formats myself—LibreOffice does the heavy lifting for parsing and converting office documents with embedded elements. That way, I just leverage an existing engine instead of reinventing the wheel, and it helps preserve formatting as accurately as it can.

So the web app actually loads LO components? How about MS Office? Other esoteric formats?

You mention elsewhere that all this can be done offline once the web app has loaded, all these components are pulled in?

I’m not actually loading LO into the browser—those parts run on the server side, so you still need an internet connection for complex document conversions. The offline functionality mostly covers simpler features like merging PDFs or converting images to PDF with WebAssembly libraries in the browser. For MS Office files or other advanced formats, I rely on LO’s server-side engine to handle parsing and conversion

I see, thank you for taking the time to explain.

I do like the about, privacy policy and terms and contions sections of the site :)

If your terms of use are not one page of Loren ipsum, I'm not investing in your startup:)

Haha, I totally get it! My website is still under heavy development, but I’m actively working on improving things. Expect some awesome updates in the next few days—stay tuned! Thanks for the feedback! I’m racing to roll out those features in the next few days—promise! And don’t worry, I’ll keep the Terms of Use far from any “Lorem ipsum” nonsense. Wouldn’t want to lose you as an investor!

Did chatgpt write this response?

What's the business model here? I'm assuming there's at least a marginal cost. As somebody who enjoys providing the world with free tools, I'm always curious how others handle the situation. Enshittification is real and comes for us all.

Right now, it’s all covered out of pocket. Long-term, I’m considering optional premium features or very minimal ads, but I’m determined to avoid the usual “enshittification” pitfalls. My goal is to keep the core service free and transparent while staying sustainable in the long run.

Has anyone tried compiling a pdf processing suite to wasm, so that we not have to upload anything to servers?

Or doing it in a native, offline app, even an Electron app if you're stuck with JavaScript for libraries?

PDFsam has been my go-to for years, it's a GPL v3 open-source offline (JavaFX) app to split, merge, extract, mix, and rotate pages from PDF files.

WASM apps can accomplish the same tasks without uploading, but fundamentally the user experience is indistinguishable: browse to a webpage, click some buttons, open/drag the file into the website, get converted file back. And even for the one or two highly-technical users that will audit the WASM and network requests to ensure no uploads happen, there's nothing preventing a page that serves the privacy-honoring suite today to swapping for one that surreptitiously uploads the documents tomorrow.

Yes, if you (foolishly/naively) trust OP, there's no leakage between uploading over SSL to his webserver, downloading, and letting his server delete it versus doing it entirely offline. But there's no way to audit that server, and again, even if there were, no way to trust that next week he doesn't get acquired by someone who wants to "unlock the value in his user data" or get a knock on the door from some persuasive men in suits.

This looks very good but I would like some more features. 1. Extract bitmaps from PDF (without conversion of any sort) 2. Extract typefaces from PDF 3. Convert to SVG 4. Extract and/or Remove Adobe Illustrator part from PDF 5. Convert all text to vector paths

Also, embedded png's and even jpg's can many times be compressed using lossless techniques see what Imageoptim can do for example.

Good work though. I have bookmarked your site.

Thanks for the great suggestions! I’ll keep those advanced extraction and vector features in mind, and I’m also looking into enhanced image compression. Really appreciate the support—stay tuned!

also check out jpegli. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2024/04/introducing-jpegli...

Also, html 2 pdf would be nice too. :-)

Congrats on the launch, it is interesting. Do you have plans for open source the project?

I'm a happy user of Stirling-PDF [1] which provides all my PDF needs. I do host it in my network and not accessible from internet for better privacy.

[1] https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

Stirling looks amazing, thanks!

Not having a privacy policy while promoting the products as having a privacy focus seems borderline malicious, as does the LLM-smelling copywriting.

Running these kinds of conversions and whatnot is rather resource intensive, where's the funding coming from?

Congrats on the launch! How does your PDF to text feature compare to services like LlamaParse and 2markdown.com? Especially in terms of layout and image understanding. And for a privacy focused service, it would be great if your privacy policy would contain text :) Is the service hosted in the EU?

I don't quite see how a web-based PDF converter has a "privacy focus". Am I not sending my PDF to the server for processing?

Note also the "about us" and the "privacy policy" page:

https://quicklypdf.com/privacy-policy

Perhaps the HN publication is a bit premature? :-(

This whole thread reads like two chatgpt bots talking to each other. HN needs a flag for obvious LLM content.

This just seems like a way to collect data by tricking non-technical people into thinking that uploading your file to a server could ever be private.

Indeed.

https://quicklypdf.com/privacy-policy

It wouldn't be private even if the privacy policy had some boilerplate. Outside of narrowly defined e2e cases, nothing is private once you give it to someone.

This is a nice UI for end users, however it seems to be a seems wrapper on top of mutool, which is distributed as AGPL. If you want to process PDF locally, legally and safely you should use their CLI instead.

How did you figure that out? Couldn't it be Poppler as well?

I read the output header, and see the Artifex (mutools / gs team) headers

Alrighty, that's a smoking gun.

Really nice! PDF editing is super underserved relative to its usage IRL, it’s always great to see new tools.

My partner needed one that has total data residency (can’t upload it) so I ended up building one as an app. It doesn’t have half the features of QuicklyPDF tho.

https://github.com/gmalette/pdf-rancher

Nice tool, simplicity is a big advantage, I'm sure you will quickly start getting more and more users. Prepare to handle them all:). It would be interesting to hear how it's implemented (tech stack, PDF libs, any tech limitations etc). And, you've got a lovely logo, please don't change it!

There is something wrong with the privacy policy @ https://quicklypdf.com/privacy-policy:

title_01

paragraph_01 title_02

paragraph_02 title_03

paragraph_03 title_04

paragraph_04 title_05

    section_list_item_01
    section_list_item_02
    section_list_item_03

Also a lot of pages still contain a lorem ipsum

My biggest scare in setting up a service where users can upload something, is the probability of "problematic" material. Is there any solution to this?

Is it a problem your service doesn't provide sharing functionality? I.e. I can imagine illegal content can be a problem if you do an image sharing service. But if it's some utility, you don't store anything for long and that's it and forbid any illegal content in terms of use.

You need to not store it for more than a few minutes - otherwise people can use it as a host by sharing the account

Who are the owners of this site, which is soliciting users to upload their (often) sensitive PDF documents? (And why is it 100% free?) In what jurisdiction is it domiciled? Is it subject to the GDPR?

The Terms & Conditions are a Lorem Ipsum placeholder; the "Contact" and "About" pages are blank. There's no signaling anywhere that invites us to trust the data controllers, at a level higher than an anonymous phishing email. The HN account is blank too and exists solely to push this site onto the front page. That's a thing that's against this forum's rules, if there was any doubt.

It tries to load Google Tag Manager without having a privacy policy when the client is in the EU so it's probably not GDPR compliant.

I wish it had the feature to redacting things!

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