Why I built BytesPDF: A fully client-side PDF tool for maximum privacy

A few months ago I needed to shrink a PDF of my own bank statement before emailing it somewhere. I opened one of the big "free online PDF compressor" sites, and the first step was: upload your file to our server.

That's the moment it clicked how backwards this is. The tools people reach for specifically when a document is sensitive — bank statements, medical records, tax filings, visa paperwork, signed contracts — are the same tools that ask you to hand that document to a server you know nothing about. You have no idea how long it's kept, who can access it, or what happens to it after the "Download" button appears.

So I built BytesPDF to remove that step entirely. There is no upload. The PDF is read and rewritten by Web Workers running on your own device — the server never receives your document's bytes, because there's no server call in the pipeline to begin with.