How it works, and how to check it yourself
Any site can claim your file stays on your device. Here is a way to confirm it in about thirty seconds.
The short version
Every page on this site is a single HTML document plus one JavaScript file. That script contains the actual algorithm implementations — MD5, SHA-256, Base64, the CSV parser, the JSON-to-YAML writer, the PDF assembler. When you drop a file or type text, the script runs in your tab and produces the result. There is no API endpoint to send anything to.
How to verify it
- Open any tool — the SHA-256 generator is a good one because you can compare its output against a known value.
- Open your browser's developer tools with F12 and switch to the Network tab. Clear it.
- Type or paste something into the tool and watch the network panel. You will see no request carrying your input — no
fetch, noXHR, no form submission. - Now disconnect from the internet entirely and use the tool again. It behaves identically, because it never needed the network.
- For an image tool, drop a large photo and watch the same panel. The file is read through the browser's file API, not uploaded.
Step 4 is the one that settles it. A site that uploads your file cannot possibly work with the network disconnected — and this one does.
What 'browser-only' cannot do
Being honest about the limits is more useful than another paragraph of reassurance. Processing inside a browser is not the same as running a tuned server-side pipeline, and there are things this approach genuinely cannot match:
- No OCR. A PDF assembled from photographs is a stack of images with no text layer. Making it searchable requires optical character recognition, which is a server-scale job.
- No magic compression. The encoders available are the ones your browser exposes. A server running mozjpeg or libavif can shave off a further percentage that this site cannot.
- No multi-file pipelines. Merging existing PDFs, splitting pages or rotating a document needs a PDF parser, which is a much larger piece of software than the writer used here.
- Bounded by your machine. A multi-gigabyte operation is limited by your tab's memory, where a server would stream it.
- No batch queue. Files are processed one at a time in the tab, in the order the codec can keep up.
Where those limits bite — OCR and PDF merging in particular — a server-side tool is the right answer, and you should use one. Privacy and capability are a genuine trade-off, not a free lunch.
Why build it this way at all
Two reasons. The first is that most of these jobs do not need a server: hashing a string, converting a JSON document or resizing a photograph are all comfortably within a browser's reach, and adding a server adds a place for your data to leak without adding anything you wanted. The second is that the alternative has become the default so completely that people no longer notice it — the upload box is simply assumed, and with it the assumption that handing over a copy is the price of getting the job done.
Accuracy of the written material
The explanations on each tool page cite the governing standards where one exists — RFC 4180 for CSV quoting, RFC 4648 for Base64 and its URL-safe alphabet, RFC 2104 for HMAC, FIPS 180-4 for the SHA-2 family, RFC 8259 for JSON, RFC 3986 for percent-encoding. Where specific numbers are given, such as the 300 dpi pixel counts for passport photographs or the collision timeline of MD5 and SHA-1, they are stated with their source or their date so you can check them independently.