About Just File Tools

A privacy-first toolbox that runs entirely in your browser.

The problem we built this for

Every time you need to do something with a file — convert a HEIC photo, merge two PDFs, extract text from a scanned document, generate a QR code — the first three Google results are roughly the same kind of site. You drop your file into their page. The file uploads to their server. Their server does the work. You download the result. Then you spend the rest of the day wondering whether their server kept a copy.

For business documents, internal photos, medical scans, financial records, sensitive contracts, and other things you'd rather not have sitting on someone else's hard drive, that workflow is wrong. The convenience of "upload, click, download" comes at the cost of the file leaving your machine. Most users either don't notice or don't have a better option. The better option does exist, and that's what this site is.

How this site is different

Every tool on Just File Tools runs entirely in your browser. There is no upload step — your file is read into your tab's memory by the browser, the work happens in JavaScript or WebAssembly inside the page you're already looking at, and the result is handed back to you as a download link. Nothing crosses the network. You can verify this yourself in DevTools by watching the Network panel stay empty while you use any of the 73 tools on this site.

The technical work to make this possible used to be hard. Browsers couldn't decode HEIC. Browsers couldn't run OCR. Browsers couldn't compress PDFs at acceptable speed. That has all changed in the last few years. WebAssembly, native browser APIs (Web Crypto, Canvas, File System Access), and well-engineered open-source libraries (pdf-lib, pdf.js, Tesseract.js, Sharp, exifr, JSZip) now make in-browser file processing genuinely competitive with server-side tools. The handful of operations browsers still can't do — Office document manipulation, high-quality video re-encoding, anything that needs gigabytes of GPU memory — we don't ship. We'd rather have a tool that's missing than one that compromises the privacy promise.

What the site is, technically

Just File Tools is a static site built with Astro and React. Each tool is a small React island that mounts into a static page only when needed. The homepage ships zero JavaScript — every script is lazy-loaded per tool. The total HTML payload for a typical tool page is under 30 KB; the heaviest tool (PDF OCR with Tesseract.js) lazy-loads a ~10 MB WebAssembly model from a CDN only on first use, then caches it in your browser for the rest of the session.

The architecture matters because in-browser processing only works if the page itself is fast. A 30-second page load to "save" you from a server upload defeats the purpose. Our pages typically render in under 200 ms over a normal connection. The tool itself starts working the moment you drop a file.

Privacy is the product

We say "your files never leave your browser" everywhere on this site because it's the single fact that distinguishes us from the alternatives. We mean it literally:

• No file upload endpoints exist on our server. There's nothing to leak from.
• Tools that need external resources (the Tesseract OCR engine, the background-removal model) fetch code from a public CDN, never user content.
• Error reporting (we use Sentry-style tracking to catch bugs) is configured to redact file names, sizes, and any content. Stack traces only.
• Analytics tracks page visits but not file events. We don't know what you processed; we only know which tool pages get traffic.

If you want to verify any of this, the network panel in Chrome DevTools (or its equivalent in any browser) shows the entire HTTP story of what happens during tool use. No file ever appears in an outbound request.

How we keep this free

The site runs on Cloudflare Pages, which is free for static-content sites at our traffic level. The hosting cost is effectively zero. The maintenance cost is real — keeping dependencies up to date, fixing bugs as browsers change, adding new tools — and we cover it with Google AdSense ads displayed alongside (never inside) the tool UI. Ads are configured to be non-intrusive: no autoplay video, no popups, no overlays. They pay for maintenance and nothing more. There is no paid tier, no sign-up wall, no "premium" version. The full toolset works the same way for everyone.

Who runs the site

Just File Tools is built and maintained by a small team of software engineers who use these tools ourselves. Several of the tools (the HEIC converter, the PDF redactor, the EXIF stripper) exist because we needed them and got tired of the upload-to-someone-else experience. Most of the tools followed because once you've built one well, the next one is mostly a different React island over a different library.

If you want to suggest a tool, report a bug, or ask anything else, the hello@justfiletools.com address reaches a human. Privacy questions go to privacy@justfiletools.com.

What we won't do

A short list, as much for accountability as anything:

• Add file uploads. The day a tool needs server-side processing is the day we add a new architecture or skip the tool. We've already skipped some popular ones (Office document conversion, video transcoding) for this reason.
• Sell or share user data. Beyond what's in the privacy policy, there's nothing to sell — we don't collect file content, and we don't collect personal information.
• Add a sign-in or sign-up flow. Anything that requires an account is a different kind of product, and the "no account, just paste your file" experience is part of what makes this site useful.
• Lock features behind a paywall. The free version is the full version.

Questions? See the privacy policy or the changelog.