About almostfree

Why these exist

Most small jobs on the web have become disproportionately annoying. Shrinking a photo before emailing it, pulling three pages out of a PDF, turning an iPhone HEIC into something a form will accept, reading what is inside a token — none of these are hard problems, and all of them are now surrounded by sign-up walls, trial periods and upload limits.

The pattern is familiar: you search for a converter, land on something that looks capable, upload your file, and only then discover the result is behind an account, a watermark or a plan. Your file, meanwhile, is now on a stranger's server.

These tools are the opposite arrangement. Open one, use it, close the tab. No account exists to create, so nothing can be locked behind one.

Why the work happens in your browser

Browsers became genuinely capable some years ago. Canvas can decode, resize and re-encode an image. WebAssembly runs video processing at a useful speed. The whole of JSON, Base64, regular expressions and cryptographic random numbers are built into the platform. For most of what these tools do, a server is no longer necessary.

So they do not use one. Your file is opened by the page, processed on your own machine, and handed back — it is never uploaded. Three things follow from that, and all three matter:

• There is no copy of your file anywhere to leak, subpoena or sell, because none was ever made.
• There is no file size limit beyond what your own device can hold.
• Once the page has loaded, the tool keeps working even if your connection drops.

You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's network tab, use any of the browser-side tools, and watch it stay quiet.

The exception, stated plainly

The video downloader cannot work this way. A web page is not allowed to read another site's media URLs — the platforms refuse cross-origin requests — so that one tool sends the link you paste to its own server, which looks the video up and streams the file back. It keeps no history of what was downloaded, and the temporary files it creates are deleted as soon as the transfer finishes. Everything else on that site, the converting and trimming and compressing, still runs in your browser.

What is here

• Video Downloader — Paste a link to save a public video, or bring your own file and convert, compress, trim, speed up, loop or grab a frame from it — the editing happens in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.
• Image Tools — Shrink a photo before emailing it, resize it to exact pixels, turn an iPhone HEIC into a JPG every website will accept, or crop it to a fixed ratio. All of it happens inside the tab — the image is never uploaded.
• PDF Tools — Combine several PDFs into one, pull out just the pages you need, straighten a sideways scan, or move between PDFs and images. Contracts and statements stay on your machine — nothing is uploaded.
• Developer Toolkit — Format a JSON payload, read what is inside a JWT, convert Base64 that contains emoji, generate UUIDs in bulk, test a regex as you type, or indent a SQL query. The things developers paste into tools are rarely harmless, so none of it is sent anywhere.
• MiniPlay — A pocketful of HTML5 mini games that start the moment you click — chess, tetris, wordle, sudoku and more. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and it works just as well on a phone as on a laptop.

How it is paid for

Everything runs on one small virtual server. Because the browser does most of the work, the cost per visitor is close to nothing — the server mostly just sends a page and then stays out of the way. Advertising covers the hosting bill. That is the entire business model: no paid tier, no data to sell, nothing held back.

The privacy page describes exactly what the ads involve and how to opt out of personalised ones.

Who builds it

One developer, working on it in spare time, in Cambodia. Bugs get fixed when they are reported and tools get added when a job turns out to be annoying enough often enough. If something is broken or missing, the contact page is the way to say so.