About Converting Free

Why this site exists

Converting Free started with a small, absurd realization: to turn an iPhone photo into a JPG, or shrink a PDF by a few megabytes, the standard advice was to upload it to a stranger's server. Contracts, medical letters, family photos, voice memos — handed over wholesale for a five-second mechanical job, to sites whose business model is usually the data itself, the ads around it, or both.

That trade never made technical sense. Browsers have been capable of doing this work themselves for years — WebAssembly runs the same engines desktop software uses, right in a tab. So we built the converter we wanted to exist: one where the "upload" step simply isn't part of the architecture.

The client-side approach

Every tool on this site — image, document and archive converters, video, audio, PDF and GIF compressors, the time-zone, unit, calculator and text utilities — does its work on your device. We compile FFmpeg, pdf.js, pdf-lib, mammoth and libarchive to WebAssembly and ship them to your browser; your files are read into your tab's memory, processed there, and saved to your Downloads folder. We never receive a byte of them.

That isn't a privacy-policy promise you have to trust — it's an architecture you can check. Open your browser's network tab while you convert something and watch nothing leave, or read the verification walkthroughs on our security page. No accounts, no ads, no tracking scripts, no server that stores files. There is nowhere for your data to go.

What we won't pretend

Honest scope matters more to us than a longer feature list. Running everything in your browser has real limits: your machine does the computing, so a big video re-encodes at your laptop's speed, not a data center's. Scanned PDFs can't become editable Word documents yet because that needs OCR (it's on the roadmap). Password-protected archives aren't supported. Very complex document layouts can lose some formatting in conversion.

Where a tool has a limitation, we write it on the page — in the FAQ, in plain language — rather than letting you find out after the download. A tool you can't trust to describe itself accurately isn't one you should trust with your files.

Who builds this