I Built a PDF Toolkit With 50+ Tools Using Open-Source Software - Here's How

About two years ago I posted PDFEquips on Hacker News and it hit the front page. The comments were fascinating - most of the discussion wasn't about the tool itself, but about privacy, whether PDF processing belongs in the cloud, and why most online PDF tools feel like they're trying to scam you. That feedback shaped everything I've built since. Here's where the project stands now and how I built it. Why I started Every online PDF tool I tried mostly had the same problems: watermarks on free conversions, forced account creation for basic tasks, aggressive upsells, or sketchy ad-filled interfaces. The underlying tech to do most PDF operations isn't complicated - the problem was packaging. So I started building PDFEquips as a clean, browser-based toolkit that does what you need without the friction. The Stack The frontend is Astro.js with React and TypeScript. I use Redux for state management and Zustand specifically for handling file blob state, which turned out to be a much cleaner pat