TheyLovePDF Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. Who are some of the biggest customers of TheyLovePDF?

   We launched recently and are not yet in a position to name customers. We would rather leave this blank than fill it with something we cannot stand behind.

2. What makes TheyLovePDF unique?

   Three things that the comparable free tools do not offer.

   Compression to an exact file size. Every PDF tool has "low / medium / high" quality presets, but that does not answer the question people actually have — a visa portal, exam board or job application caps uploads at exactly 200KB. TheyLovePDF searches image resolution and JPEG quality for the largest file that still fits the limit, so you keep as much quality as the cap allows instead of compressing blindly and hoping. There are presets for 100KB, 200KB and 1MB. Measured on a four-page scan: 2,608KB reduced to 172KB while retaining 96.8% of the original edge sharpness, so the text stays readable.

   OCR in 25 languages on the free tier, including Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi, with a dedicated right-to-left layout mode. Most free tools handle Latin scripts only, or place OCR behind a paid plan entirely.

   No daily task counter. The free tier is not a trial that runs out. All 43 tools work with files up to 10MB, without an account, and nothing we produce carries a watermark on any plan.

3. Why should a person choose TheyLovePDF over its competitors?

   Because the free tier is the product, not a sample of it.

   iLovePDF and Smallpdf meter free users to a set number of tasks per day and ask for an account once you cross it. Adobe Acrobat Pro is $19.99/month. TheyLovePDF applies no daily limit — the only constraint is 10MB per file, and Pro at $4.99/month raises that to 2GB.

   That is possible because we run our own processing stack rather than paying a third-party conversion API per file. Ghostscript, Tesseract and LibreOffice run on our own servers, so there is no per-conversion cost to pass on to the user and no reason to count anyone's tasks.

   It also means files never reach a third party. Uploads are deleted automatically within 2 hours, transfers use 256-bit SSL, and document contents are never stored or monetised.

   Where another tool is the better choice, we say so on our comparison page: Adobe for certified redaction or PDF/A compliance, a desktop application for files above 2GB. TheyLovePDF covers the everyday work — convert, merge, compress, sign, protect, fill forms — without a subscription or an install.

4. How would you describe the primary audience of TheyLovePDF?

   People who hit a specific wall rather than people shopping for PDF software.

   The largest group is applicants: students and job seekers uploading documents to portals with hard size limits — university admissions, visa applications, government e-services, competitive exam boards. They do not want a PDF suite, they want a file under 200KB that is still readable.

   The second group is South and Central Asian and Middle Eastern users with documents in Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Bengali or Punjabi. Free OCR generally stops at Latin scripts, which leaves a large number of people with no straightforward option.

   Beyond that: freelancers and small businesses signing agreements and converting invoices, accountants pulling bank statements into spreadsheets, and anyone who needs one PDF task done occasionally and does not want to create an account for it.

   Geographically strongest in Pakistan, India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with the interface available in 30 languages.

5. What's the story behind TheyLovePDF?

   It started with a size limit.

   Applying for things online in Pakistan means meeting upload caps — 200KB here, 100KB there, and the portal simply rejects anything larger. The usual free compressors offer quality presets, so the routine becomes: compress, check the size, still too big, compress harder, now the text is unreadable, start again.

   The obvious fix was a tool where you state the size you need and it finds the best quality that fits. Once that existed, the rest followed — a second gap was OCR, where free tools cover English and stop, leaving Urdu and Arabic documents with nothing. Then conversion, signing, form filling, and eventually 43 tools.

   The decision that shaped everything else was running our own processing stack instead of reselling a conversion API. It is more work, but it is the reason the free tier can stay genuinely free rather than becoming a trial with a counter attached.

6. Which are the primary technologies used for building TheyLovePDF?

   Frontend: React 18, Vite, Tailwind CSS, react-router, i18next for 30 languages, PWA via Workbox. pdf-lib runs in the browser for tools that do not need a server — watermarks, page numbers, reordering, blank pages, form filling and annotation never upload anything.

   Backend: Node.js with Express for the API, job queue and tool orchestration. A separate Python/Flask service handles heavy document work.

   Document processing: Ghostscript for compression and repair, Tesseract 5 for OCR across 25 languages, LibreOffice via Gotenberg for Office formats, and PyMuPDF, pdfplumber, pdf2docx, python-pptx and openpyxl for extraction and conversion. pdf-lib handles page-level operations server-side.

   Platform: Supabase for authentication and Postgres, LemonSqueezy for payments, Resend for transactional email, Google Gemini with Groq as fallback for the AI tools. Deployed on DigitalOcean behind Nginx and Cloudflare.

   Desktop: Electron for Windows, macOS and Linux. There is also a Chrome extension.