PDFAPPLE is a free, privacy-first web application that lets anyone convert, compress, and reshape PDF files in seconds. We launched in 2018 as a one-person side project and now serve more than 42 million files per year across 193 countries, all without a single dollar of advertising spend.
Our story
In 2018, our founder Daniel Lee was finishing a PhD thesis when he realised that every online PDF converter he tried either upsold aggressively, bricked at 20 MB, or quietly watermarked his work. He spent one weekend writing a cleaner alternative, called it PDFAPPLE, and shared the link in a few study groups. Within a month, the site was processing a thousand files a day; within a year, a hundred thousand.
Daniel registered a UK company, hired a part-time engineer, and reinvested every subscription dollar into better servers, 256-bit encryption, and a brand-new OCR pipeline. By 2022, the team had grown to twelve people spread across London, Toronto and Taipei. In 2024 we rebuilt our entire infrastructure on Kubernetes and multi-region storage to meet SOC 2 Type II requirements. Today, PDFAPPLE powers document workflows for over 25,000 paying companies and keeps the free tier free for everyone else.
Our mission
Give every person on the planet friction-free control over their own documents, without surrendering their privacy to do it.
That one sentence shapes every product decision we make. It is why we do not store uploaded files, why we refuse to train AI models on user content, and why we publish our privacy policy in plain English rather than legalese.
What we believe
- Documents are personal. We treat every file as if it were our own tax return — never read, never retained, never resold.
- Fast is a feature. If a conversion takes longer than ten seconds for most users, we treat it as a bug.
- Free should mean free. No watermarks, no sign-ups to download, no artificial trial clocks.
- Transparency over marketing. We publish uptime, incidents and a yearly transparency report. Honest engineering beats glossy claims.
- Humans answer the phone. Our support team is not outsourced and not scripted. If you write to us, a real person reads it.
By the numbers
Our technology
The PDFAPPLE engine is a hybrid of open-source libraries we have patched extensively and proprietary code we built from scratch:
- PDF parsing: a hardened fork of qpdf plus our own stream-aware layout analyser.
- OCR: Tesseract 5 extended with 23 custom language models and a layout-aware post-processor.
- Rasterisation: MuPDF compiled with libjpeg-turbo for sub-second page rendering.
- Image compression: MozJPEG and our in-house perceptual quality estimator.
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes clusters in Dublin, Virginia and Singapore, auto-scaling on request latency.
We contribute every bug fix back upstream — see our GitHub profile for pull requests to qpdf, MuPDF, Tesseract and poppler.
Where we work
PDFAPPLE Ltd. is registered in England & Wales (company no. 11574422). Our registered office is at 71–75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ. We also have co-working desks in Toronto (Canada) and Taipei (Taiwan). Engineering is fully remote — we hire the best people wherever they are.
Press & media
Looking for logos, screenshots, founder bios or an interview? Email [email protected] and we will send a complete press kit the same day.
Careers
We open roles twice a year. Current openings and the hiring process are documented at contact → careers. We are proudly a 100% remote-first employer and offer unlimited paid leave above a 25-day floor.
Timeline
- 2018 — PDFAPPLE launches as a weekend project with three tools (PDF ↔ Word, Compress).
- 2019 — First 10 000 users; adds Excel and PowerPoint support.
- 2020 — Migrates to a multi-region cloud; introduces OCR for scanned PDFs.
- 2021 — Hits 1 million monthly users; opens the REST API.
- 2022 — Team grows to 12 people; publishes first annual transparency report.
- 2023 — Launches on-premise appliance; signs first enterprise contract.
- 2024 — Achieves SOC 2 Type II certification.
- 2025 — Introduces team seats, SAML/SSO, EU data-residency option.
- 2026 — Celebrates 42 million conversions in a single year.