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Comment by nip | Hacker News Reader

We offer both:

- A privacy-focused PDF editor, free for individuals, used by 200k users monthly: https://simplepdf.com/editor

- The same editor, embeddable into one’s app for companies, with the same privacy guarantees (everything happens in the browser) + the resulting PDF is stored in their own storage (« bring your own storage »).

The majority of our paid customers are in healthcare where privacy is non-negotiable. Co-pilot extends that to the AI world (« bring your own AI »)

What are you using the PDF editor for?

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This is very late sorry, just checking HN.

I like that, but (and I might be ignorant) can't you just change it's all in browser to something else and the users would be oblivious? I'm cautious of this because these kind of solutions still susceptible to a lot of problems internally or some kind of governmental interception.

Is it possible to download as an app and disable internet (not sure if it's a feature of any browsers).

> like that, but (and I might be ignorant) can't you just change it's all in browser to something else and the users would be oblivious?

Excellent question! The answer is simple: we're known on the market, and trusted by our customer for this secure handling of PDFs. Should we decide to change that (unbeknownst to them), we would effectively kill our reputation and the company by extension.

> Is it possible to download as an app and disable internet (not sure if it's a feature of any browsers).

Back in the days, SimplePDF used to work offline. However maintaining that in conjunction with our paid customers features (where the online connectivity is mandatory) was too big of a maintenance burden. We decided a year ago to drop this support (silently), and no one has complained since then, confirming our hunch that it is not a high-demand feature.

I hope this doesn't sound insulting but how is this different than Preview or Adobe Acrobat?

Absolutely not insulting! In fact an excellent question!

Preview was an inspiration when I started SimplePDF, my goal was to make the "Preview" of the web, so that people without a Mac would benefit from a software matching Preview in ease of use and overall polish.

Adobe Acrobat: SimplePDF has "Simple" in the name as the philosophy is to keep it simple (both in ease of use, and features): I don't intend to support everything that Adobe Acrobat does. There's a lot of features that I could build that I intentionally do not, as they would bloat the UI and hard the overall usability. Most people have very simple needs and don't need advanced features (like scripting, etc).

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