Nearly every PDF site works the same way: you upload a file, a server converts it, you download the result, and a line in the privacy policy promises the copy is deleted within the hour. That is a reasonable design. It is also completely unnecessary for most of what people do to PDFs.
Merging, splitting, rotating, compressing, watermarking, page numbering, cropping, encrypting, converting to and from Word, rendering to images, extracting text and images, editing, signing and redacting all run in your browser. The PDF engine is compiled into the page; images are re-encoded through the Canvas API; pages are rendered by Mozilla’s pdf.js, the same renderer Firefox uses. Nothing is transmitted.
Chat with PDF, Summarize and OCR need a language model, and a language model does not fit in a browser tab. For those, extracted text or rendered page images travel through our Cloudflare Worker to OpenRouter. The PDF file itself still does not. If that is not acceptable for a particular document, the other 25 tools are unaffected.
There is one more, smaller one: signing with your phone. Scanning the QR code in the signature panel posts the drawing to a single-use record that lasts fifteen minutes, because that is the only way a phone can hand something to a laptop. The document being signed still never moves.
Files you save are encrypted in your browser, with a key derived from your password by PBKDF2 and never transmitted. A breach of our storage yields ciphertext. A subpoena served on us yields ciphertext. Nobody working on bakepdf can open your documents, and that is not a policy we could quietly change — it is the absence of a key.
The catch, said plainly because every browser-based product with this claim has it: we serve the JavaScript that does the encrypting. A future version of this site could ship code that sends your key somewhere. That is true of every web application making this promise, and it is why the honest description is “we have removed our ability to read your files, and you are trusting us not to reintroduce it”, rather than a mathematical guarantee. What it does buy you is real: an attacker who takes our database and our object storage gets nothing readable.
And the price: forget your password, lose your recovery code, and the documents are unrecoverable. Save the code when it is shown.
Because the tools run on your machine, the daily counter and the ten-page cap are meters the app reports to, not gates your file has to pass through. Someone technical could work around either. We would rather say that out loud than pretend to an enforcement we do not have — they exist so that the people who get value from this pay for it, and that is the only reason the site can exist without ads or watermarks.