
LightUtils
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LightUtils is 50 file and text tools that run entirely inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and that is enforced rather than promised: every page is served with a Content-Security-Policy of connect-src 'none', which means the browser itself refuses to let the page make a network request.
That one decision changes what the tools are for. A scanned contract, a payslip, a customer list โ the documents most worth working on are the ones nobody should be dropping on a stranger's server. Here they never leave the machine, so there is also no queue, no upload wait and no file size limit imposed by one.
What is in it
Free forever. No account, no email, no watermark, no daily limit. Fully bilingual in English and Thai, with Thai written as Thai rather than translated.
LightUtils
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LightUtils's answer
The no-upload promise is enforced by the browser, not by our word for it.
Every page is served with a Content-Security-Policy containing connect-src 'none'. That directive means the browser refuses to let the page make any network request. Our own code could not send your file anywhere if it tried, and anyone can check it in about ten seconds:
Almost every "private, client-side" tool on the web is a claim in a marketing paragraph. This one is a header you can read.
Two things follow from it. There is nothing to upload, so no queue, no round trip, and no file size limit that exists only because someone is paying for bandwidth. And there is no account, because there is no server to hold one.
LightUtils's answer
Because the documents most worth working on are the ones you should not hand to a stranger's server: a signed contract, a payslip, a bank statement, a customer list. On Smallpdf or iLovePDF those files are uploaded, processed remotely, and deleted on a schedule you have to trust. Here they never leave the machine.
| LightUtils | Typical online tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Your file | Never leaves the browser | Uploaded to a server |
| Daily limit | None | Usually 2 free tasks |
| Watermark | Never | Common on free tiers |
| Account | None, ever | Required past the free tier |
| Upload wait | None | Scales with your file |
Beyond that:
LightUtils's answer
Two groups, and the second is the reason the site exists.
Anyone with a file and a task. Compress a PDF to fit an email limit, merge scans, trim a video, crop an image. They arrive from a search for that exact task and want it done in one screen.
People who are not allowed to upload the file. Lawyers, accountants, HR staff, clinics, and anyone working under Thailand's PDPA or the GDPR, where sending a document containing personal data to a third-party processor needs a legal basis rather than a convenience. For them "runs in your browser" is not a feature, it is the only way the task is permitted at all.
Geographically it is built for Thailand and the English-speaking world equally, which is unusual: most tool sites are English with a machine-translated Thai page bolted on.
LightUtils's answer
It started with a CSV file that Excel kept opening as garbled Thai. The fix is well known to developers and invisible to everybody else, and every free tool offering it wanted the file uploaded first. Sending a customer export to an unknown server to correct a text encoding is an absurd trade, and it is the trade almost every online tool asks for.
So the first tool was written to run in the browser. Then the harder question: how do you prove it? A promise in a privacy policy proves nothing. connect-src 'none' does, because the browser enforces it and anyone can read the header.
Once that constraint was fixed, the rest followed from it. No accounts, no server, no framework, no runtime dependencies. Fifty tools later the constraint has never been relaxed, and every claim on the site is checked by an automated test before it can ship, including the security header itself.
Built and maintained by CODENIVERSE, a software studio in Thailand.
LightUtils's answer
Deliberately almost none.
Intl.Segmenter for Thai word segmentation.LightUtils's answer
None, and it would be easy to invent some.
LightUtils has no accounts, collects no personal data and sets no analytics cookies, so we genuinely do not know who uses it โ there is nothing on the site capable of telling us. That is the same decision as everything else here, and naming customers we cannot verify would undercut the one thing the product is for.
Based on our record, Smallpdf seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 38 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
According to statistics from smallpdf.com, by 2025, there will be a massive 2.5 trillion PDF documents stored worldwide, and 290 billion new PDF documents will be created every year. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
Smallpdf [1] probably deserves a mention here. Not OSS and not self-hosted, but Iโve used it occasionally and it has always worked really well. When I was running an agency, we inherited their first office โ very cool folks. [1] https://smallpdf.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
And use this one to merge two single-page pdf to make a double side page. Source: over 2 years ago
I don't have Office 365 for the "Get Data" option, nor do I have Adobe Acrobat. I've tried the smallpdf website but it came out a mess, possibly because my original spreadsheet had highlighted rows and lots of text in some of the cells. Source: over 3 years ago
Examples of companies doing this well: - SmallPDF users can convert or compress a limited number of files without an account โ turning users into advocates and customers once paid use cases comes along; - Freshline uses interactive product demos to help users self-educate and understand the value of their features, without a paywall or registration;. Source: over 3 years ago
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