Starting the machine
Loading the editor. Your files stay on this device.
Merge PDFs and images, insert blank pages, reorder, crop and split; fill forms; add signatures, page numbers and watermarks; or make scanned pages searchable with local OCR. Your documents stay in this browser tab. There is no signup, no account and no cost, and the editor can be installed for offline use.
There is no upload endpoint. The page reads your file into memory using the browser's own file APIs, every edit happens in this tab, and the exported PDF is assembled here and saved straight back to your device. Document content is not transmitted, so there is no remote copy for anyone to store, read or leak.
The site does count how often each action is used, and only that. Each tracked action sends one event name from a fixed list of eight and nothing else, so no filenames, no annotation text and no image data ever leave the page. There is no third-party analytics script, no cookie and no persistent identifier, which is why there is no consent banner. The optional feedback form sends only the category, message and email address you deliberately submit to Netlify Forms; it never includes document content. Working documents are not persisted, so closing the tab discards them.
Display and export are separate systems. Previews are drawn with pdf.js purely so you can see the pages, and those pixels are never exported. The export is built with pdf-lib at the PDF object level: page content is copied byte for byte, rotation is stored as the page's rotation metadata rather than re-rendering, and embedded JPEGs keep their original bytes so they are never re-compressed.
A 300 DPI scan exports at 300 DPI.
Most free web PDF tools work by uploading your document to the operator's servers, processing it there, and giving back a download link. That means your file sits on someone else's infrastructure, subject to their retention window, their staff access and their breach risk. The free tier is usually gated by an email signup, a daily quota, or a watermark on the output, and many of them rasterize the document, which quietly degrades scans and text.
Free PDF Machine never uploads the file, asks for nothing, adds no branding watermark, and copies the original page objects instead of re-rendering them. Those differences are verifiable rather than promised: there is no upload step to opt out of, because there is no server-side processing to upload to.
Everything runs on your own hardware, so very large documents are bounded by your device's memory. It opens PDFs and images only: Word, PowerPoint and Excel files are not converted, because the application that made them exports a better PDF than any in-browser converter can. OCR is English-only, form filling supports standard AcroForms but not XFA, and there is no compression targeting a smaller file size, collaboration or cloud storage. Nothing is kept between sessions. A PDF locked with a password to view cannot be opened.
Yes, completely. There is no paid tier, no trial period, no product-added watermark, no page or file-size limit imposed by the product, and no feature reserved for a premium plan. A batch watermark is added only if you choose one. It does not ask for a credit card and there is nothing to cancel. The price is 0 USD and the whole tool is available to everyone who opens the page.
No. Your files are opened and edited inside your own browser tab and are never sent to a server. There is no upload step in the product because there is no server-side document processing to upload to: the page reads the file from your device into memory, and the edited PDF is assembled in the browser and saved straight back to your device. Because document content is not transmitted, there is no remote copy for anyone to store, read or leak.
No. There is no account system at all. You do not enter an email address, you do not verify anything, and there is no login screen. You open the page and start working. The consequence is that nothing is saved between visits: when you close the tab, the working document and any signatures you drew are gone, so download your exported PDF before you leave.
It can merge PDFs and images; insert editable blank pages; reorder, rotate, delete, resize and crop pages; undo and redo page edits; split ranges into a ZIP; add signatures, annotations, page numbers and watermarks; fill and flatten supported AcroForm fields; and run English OCR locally on selected scanned pages. You can export the whole document or only selected pages.
No, and that is deliberate. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Pages and Keynote can each export a PDF themselves, with File then Print then Save as PDF, or File then Export as PDF. That file is produced by the application that owns the format, using your real fonts and its own layout engine, so it matches your document exactly. A converter running inside a browser has to reimplement that layout with substituted fonts, and it will differ somewhere. Export the PDF from the application that made the file, then add it here to merge, crop, split, sign, annotate, fill or OCR it.
Yes, after the first online visit. Install it or revisit it after the offline cache has been prepared and the editor can load without a connection. PDF editing and export stay local. OCR's English model must be used online once before that model is available offline.
No. The exported PDF is rebuilt from the original bytes of the file you opened rather than from what you see on screen. Page content is copied at the PDF object level, so text stays as text and vectors stay as vectors; rotation is recorded as page metadata instead of re-rendering the page; and embedded JPEGs keep their original bytes, so they are never re-compressed. A high-resolution scan comes out at the same resolution it went in.
It is designed for exactly that case. Contracts, medical records, bank statements and identity documents stay on your machine, which is the difference between this and an online PDF service that requires you to upload the file first. The one thing to be aware of is that the tool cannot open a PDF that is locked with a password to view.
Free PDF Machine is made by Amit Raz at RZ AI Labs, an AI consulting and software development practice based in Haifa, Israel. There is a project page for Free PDF Machine and a write-up of how it was built with Claude Code. The source is public on GitHub.