How I Built a Free PDF Tool That Processes Files Locally in the Browser

If you have ever used iLovePDF, Smallpdf, or Sejda to merge or compress a PDF, your file was uploaded to a remote server you know nothing about. Most people do not realise this is happening. The tools work so smoothly that the upload is invisible. I realised this one day when I uploaded a contract to compress it before sending. It worked fine. Then I thought about what had actually happened — I had just sent a sensitive legal document to a server I had never heard of, in a location I did not know, to be processed by software I could not inspect. That bothered me enough to build something different. What I Built I built Aservus — a free online toolkit available at https://aservus.com with 23 tools for working with PDF files and documents. The core idea: process as much as possible locally in the browser so files never leave the user's device. The Technical Architecture Aservus uses a privacy-first hybrid model. Here is how it breaks down honestly: Local processing (WebAssembly in the br