Frequently Asked Questions

It depends on the tool, and every tool page says which applies. Twenty-two of Utilitly's 26 tools run entirely in your browser — Merge, Split, Rotate, Reorder Pages, Delete Pages, PDF to Image, Image to PDF, Extract Images, Annotate, Watermark PDF, Add Page Numbers, PDF Text Extractor, True Text Editor, AI Author, Sign PDF, Protect PDF, Unlock PDF and all five image tools. Those files are read from your device, processed on your own hardware, and never sent over the internet, so there is nothing to store. Four tools cannot work that way and do send your file to an external processing service: Compress PDF, PDF to Office, Office to PDF and Advanced OCR.

Your file is transferred over an encrypted HTTPS connection to a third-party processing service, converted there, and returned to your browser as a download. It is not processed on your device. The same applies to Office to PDF, Advanced OCR and PDF compression. Protect PDF and Unlock PDF are not in this group: since August 2026 they encrypt and decrypt on your own machine using qpdf compiled to WebAssembly, and neither the document nor the password is transmitted.

Utilitly does not hold a HIPAA business associate agreement, a published data processing agreement, or a SOC 2 attestation, so it should not be treated as pre-approved for regulated data. The distinction that matters is per tool. The 22 in-browser tools never transmit your file at all, so using them involves no disclosure to anyone. The four that upload do disclose your document to an external processor, which your organisation needs to assess against its own obligations. Do not put protected health information through those four without that assessment.

Utilitly does not use your documents to train AI models. For the four tools that send files to an external processing service, that service handles your document under its own terms, and Utilitly does not publish verified terms covering its logging or training practices — so no assurance is offered here on its behalf. If that matters for a given document, use one of the 22 tools that never transmit it.

Audit it directly. Open your browser's Developer Tools (press F12), go to the Network tab, and use the tool. With an in-browser tool you will see no request carrying your file payload — only static asset loads such as scripts and worker files. With Compress PDF, PDF to Office, Office to PDF or Advanced OCR you will see the upload, because those four genuinely upload. If any page on this site contradicts what the Network tab shows, the page is what is wrong.

The in-browser tools are built on JavaScript PDF libraries that run inside your browser tab — pdf-lib, pdf.js and @react-pdf/renderer — rather than a custom WebAssembly engine. WebAssembly does the heavy lifting in two places: the in-browser OCR in the PDF Text Extractor, which runs tesseract.js, and the layout engine inside @react-pdf/renderer that AI Author uses to paginate a document. For privacy purposes the library matters less than the boundary: with these tools the file is never sent anywhere, which you can confirm yourself in the Network tab.

Not from a cold start, but the work continues if your connection drops. Utilitly.com is a website, not an installed application, so the page has to load before anything runs. Once it has, the 22 in-browser tools run entirely on your device: the pdf.js worker, the OCR engine and every export font are served from utilitly.com rather than a CDN, so you can disconnect and keep merging, splitting, rotating, cropping, watermarking, encrypting or reading a scanned page. A few tools load their library on the first press of the button, so if the connection is already gone before you have run that tool once, that first run will fail. Compress PDF, PDF to Office, Office to PDF and Advanced OCR upload the file and need a connection throughout.

The in-browser tools have no fixed cap and are limited by your device's available memory, which on a modern computer comfortably covers documents of several hundred MB. Compress PDF accepts files up to 100 MB. PDF to Office accepts up to 100 MB and 400 pages.

Utilitly.com is fully supported on all modern evergreen browsers: Google Chrome (v90+), Mozilla Firefox (v89+), Microsoft Edge (v90+), and Apple Safari (v15+). Internet Explorer is not supported.

The Free tier covers the in-browser PDF and image utilities — Merge, Split, Rotate, Reorder Pages, Delete Pages, PDF to Image, Image to PDF and all four free image tools — with no usage caps. Compress PDF is also free of charge but needs a signed-in account, because it runs on an external service. Free accounts additionally get one Basic-tier action per month. Basic ($4.99/month) adds Annotate PDF, Add Page Numbers, Watermark PDF, Watermark Image, Protect PDF, Unlock PDF, Office to PDF, PDF to Office, Basic OCR and Extract Images. Pro ($9.99/month) unlocks the True Text Editor, AI Author (Markdown to PDF), Advanced OCR Scanner and Sign PDF.

The Free tier itself acts as a permanent trial — you get unlimited access to all core utilities with no time limit or credit card required. When you are ready to unlock premium tools, you can upgrade to Basic or Pro at any time from your account page. There is no lock-in; you can cancel anytime.

You can cancel your subscription at any time from your Account page. Navigate to Account → Billing and click "Manage Billing." This opens the Stripe customer portal where you can cancel, downgrade, or update your plan instantly. Your access continues until the end of your current billing period, and you are never charged again after cancellation.

We accept all major credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover) through our secure Stripe payment processor. Your card details are never stored or handled by Utilitly.com directly — all billing is managed entirely through Stripe's PCI-DSS Level 1 certified infrastructure.

We collect only the minimum data necessary to operate your account: your email address and name (via Clerk authentication), and your subscription tier status (via Stripe). We do not collect behavioral analytics on how you interact with files, and we never collect or store any document data. We never use your data to train AI.

Yes. You can request full account deletion at any time by contacting our support team. Upon deletion, your account credentials, tier metadata, and billing records are permanently removed from our systems. Since we do not store document data, there is nothing file-related to delete.

Yes. Account authentication is handled exclusively by Clerk, an enterprise-grade identity platform. Utilitly.com never stores, handles, or has access to your password at any point. Clerk provides industry-standard security including bcrypt hashing, rate limiting, and optional two-factor authentication.