Free PDF tools, made properly

Why we built it

Almost everyone needs to merge, sign or shrink a PDF now and then. The free tools most people find have a catch. While planning Plainpage we looked at the most popular services and what their users say about them:

• Limits and paywalls. Free plans cap how often you can download, or keep strong compression, OCR and batch processing for paying users. One major service gives signed-out visitors a single free use per tool.
• Uploads. Your contracts, IDs and bank statements are sent to someone else’s servers to be processed, with a promise to delete them later.
• Subscriptions. A common complaint in reviews is free trials that quietly renew into paid plans.
• Ads and clutter around something that should take ten seconds.

We think everyday PDF jobs shouldn’t cost money or privacy. So we built Plainpage to run entirely in your browser, with every tool free and unlimited.

How it can be free

Because your own device does the work, Plainpage has no expensive servers to run. Nova Site covers the small cost of hosting the website. There are no ads, we don’t sell data, and there’s no paid version.

It’s also our showcase. Plainpage is an example of the fast, careful websites and web apps Nova Site builds for businesses. If you like how it works, that’s the standard we build to, and we’d love to hear about your project.

How your files stay private

When you choose a file, your browser reads it from your device. Plainpage’s code, which runs inside your browser, makes the changes, and the result goes straight to your downloads. There’s no upload step at any point.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Open a tool and switch off your internet connection: everything keeps working. Or open your browser’s developer tools and watch the Network tab while a tool runs. You won’t see your file going anywhere.

Analytics is optional and off until you allow it. Even then, it only counts visits and which tools are used. File names and file contents are never sent. See our privacy policy.

What Plainpage can’t do (yet)

We’d rather be honest than oversell:

• It can’t convert Word, Excel or PowerPoint files into PDF. Doing that well needs office software on a server, which would mean uploading your file. Word, Google Docs and LibreOffice can all save as PDF themselves.
• PDF to Word gives you editable text and headings, not an exact copy of the layout.
• Edit PDF changes text line by line. It doesn’t reflow whole paragraphs, and scanned pages need OCR before their text can be edited.
• Signatures are visible signature images, not certificate-based digital signatures.
• Very large files depend on your device’s memory. Older phones may struggle with documents of hundreds of megabytes.

Built on open source

Plainpage stands on excellent open-source work, including Mozilla’s pdf.js for displaying PDFs, pdf-lib for editing them, and Tesseract for recognising text. Their licences are listed on our open-source licences page.

Who we are

Nova Site is a small web design studio in Pretoria, Gauteng. It’s run by co-founder Ryno Kahl, who handles design, development and client communication himself, so the person you talk to is the person who builds. We design and build custom websites and web apps, and handle hosting, SEO and Google Ads for businesses in South Africa and further afield.

Visit Nova Site info@novasite.co.za

Feedback

Found a bug, or want a tool we don’t have yet? Email info@novasite.co.za. We read everything.