PDFShore is an independent project: twenty privacy-first PDF tools that run entirely in your browser, including token and word counters, a Markdown converter, and a hidden instructions scanner. Nothing gets uploaded, because I built it so nothing would be.
I built the first one of these for myself. I had a contract to work on, full of personal details, mine and other people's, and every tool I found wanted the file uploaded before it would do anything. None of their homepages made it clear what happened to that file after it left my laptop. For plenty of documents that wouldn't matter. For this one it did.
So I made a page that did the job in the browser and sent nothing anywhere. Then I needed a second tool, and a third. At some point it stopped being a workaround for my own problem and started looking like something worth putting online, on the assumption that other people have had the same doubt and uploaded the file anyway.
Modern browsers can do real PDF work without a server. I use pdf-lib and PDF.js compiled to WebAssembly, running in Web Workers so the page stays responsive. The same architecture powers the AI tools: the token counter runs gpt-tokenizer locally, and the Markdown converter uses Tesseract OCR on your device.
You don't have to take my word for it. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run a file through any tool here. You'll see requests for the page and the code, and none carrying your document. It's the same test I'd want to run before trusting somebody else's tool.
Working in the browser sets real limits, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Very large files depend on how much memory your device can spare. The redaction tool covers content visually rather than producing a certified, audited removal, so regulated legal and medical work belongs in specialist software. There's no e-signature with an audit trail, no PDF to Word conversion, and no account syncing anything between devices.
Ads cover hosting. That's the whole model. There's no paid tier, no wall after the third file of the day, and no account to create, which also means there's no user database to lose. Since your documents never leave your device, they aren't part of what gets monetized, and they couldn't be.
I'm Max Shore, and I work on this alone, in the open. No investors, no growth team, no dark patterns. It started as a tool for one person and mostly still gets built that way, one annoyance at a time.
Bug reports, feature ideas, or just hi: hello@pdfshore.com. I read everything.