About PDFLite

Why PDFLite Exists

In 2026, most online PDF tools work the same way: you upload a file, it goes to a company's servers, gets processed, then gets deleted (hopefully). For lawyers handling privileged communications, healthcare teams managing patient records, and finance professionals protecting client accounts — that risk is unacceptable.

PDFLite flips this model. No server upload. Ever. All processing happens in your browser, using the same open-source libraries that power Smallpdf and iLovePDF — but running entirely on your device.

What We Do

PDFLite is a set of privacy-first PDF tools:

• Merge PDFs — combine multiple files into one
• Split PDFs — separate one file into individual pages or custom ranges
• Convert Images to PDF — JPG/PNG → PDF with page-size options
• Convert Word to PDF — .docx → PDF with real, searchable text (not a screenshot)
• Convert Excel to PDF — .xlsx/.xls → PDF tables

All processing happens in your browser. No file upload, no server storage, no logs.

How It Works

PDFLite uses battle-tested open-source libraries, all running in the browser:

• pdf-lib — merge, split, extract pages
• mammoth.js + pdfmake — Word document conversion with real text
• SheetJS — Excel spreadsheet parsing
• JSZip — packaging multiple files into a zip

Want to verify this yourself? Open your browser's Network tab (DevTools) while using PDFLite. You'll see no POST requests to any backend server — only the static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript libraries loading from CDNs. That's it.

Who This Is For

Lawyers — handling privileged communications, discovery documents, case files, and client exhibits without risking breach under Model Rule 1.6.

Healthcare teams — managing patient records (PHI) under HIPAA without uploading to a third party.

Finance professionals — combining tax returns, W-2s, invoices, and client packets containing SSNs and account numbers.

Anyone else — who simply doesn't want a stranger's company to touch their documents.

Pricing

Free: 3 actions per day, or 15 pages per job (whichever hits first). No signup required.

Premium: $5 USD/month for unlimited actions, no page limits, and early access to new features.

No hidden fees. No upsells. Cancel anytime.

Honesty About Limits

PDFLite is honest about what it can and cannot do:

• Word to PDF: Preserves text, headings, lists, bold, italic, tables, and images. Does not preserve exact layout (headers/footers, footnotes, precise fonts) — reflows content instead.
• Excel to PDF: Converts cell data and sheet structure into tables. Does not render charts, images, or cell-level formatting (fills, merged cells).
• No PowerPoint support yet: No mature, trustworthy open-source library exists for client-side PPTX rendering. We'd rather skip than ship something unreliable.
• Not a security tool: Client-side processing avoids third-party server risk, but doesn't protect against malware or device compromise. Use real security practices for highly sensitive work.

What's Coming

Text recognition (OCR): Live now as a Premium tool. Scanned PDFs are read in the browser with Tesseract (WebAssembly) and come back searchable, so the Redact tool can find names and numbers in them.

Signing: Live now at /sign-pdf-free. Draw, type or upload a signature and place it on any page — a simple electronic signature, stamped into the PDF on your device.

Redaction: Live now at /redact-pdf-free. Black out sensitive information (names, account numbers, medical details) — affected pages are re-drawn so the redacted content is removed from the file, not just visually covered, and the result is checked for leftover text before download.

Beta testing: Premium users will get early access before public release.

Open Source & Transparency

PDFLite itself is not open source (it's a commercial product), but it stands entirely on open-source foundations:

• pdf-lib — Apache 2.0
• mammoth.js — BSD-2-Clause
• pdfmake — MIT
• SheetJS — Commercial with CDN distribution

You can inspect the source of any library yourself. We're not hiding anything.

No Watermarks, No Tracking

Unlike Smallpdf and iLovePDF, PDFLite never adds watermarks to free-tier output. What you process is what you get.

We also don't track your files or their content. Client-side usage tracking (for free-tier limits) happens entirely in your browser using a browser fingerprint — not tied to your identity or sent to our servers.

Contact & Support

Questions, feedback, or issues? Reach out:

hello@pdflite.io