The short version
PDFStaple is run by 4 Save Soft d.o.o. Novi Sad, a company registered in Serbia. We do not ask who you are, and we have not built anything that could tell us. There are no user accounts, no newsletter, no advertising network, and no analytics service of any kind embedded in this site — not Google Analytics, not a “privacy-friendly” alternative, none. Nothing about your visit is sold or shared for marketing.
Tools that never upload your file
These tools do the work inside your browser tab using pdf-lib. Your file is read from your disk into your own browser’s memory, changed there, and handed straight back to you as a download. It is never transmitted to us, so there is nothing for us to store, inspect, or delete:
JPG to PDF also runs locally when the input really is a JPG or PNG. HEIC, TIFF and WebP images need transcoding that the browser engine cannot do, so those always take the server path described below.
There is one honest caveat. If the in-browser engine cannot handle a particular file — an encrypted PDF, or an unusual internal structure it does not understand — the tool quietly retries on the server rather than failing on you. You are never left guessing which happened: the result screen tells you either “processed entirely in your browser; nothing was uploaded” or that the file is on our servers and will be deleted in two hours. Read that line if it matters to you.
Tools that do upload your file
The rest — OCR, compression, format conversion, and anything else needing a real document engine — cannot run in a browser tab. For those, your file travels over an encrypted HTTPS connection to our server, is processed, and the result is made available for you to download.
Both the file you uploaded and the file we produced are deleted two hours later, by a scheduled cleanup job, whether or not you downloaded the result. The job record that tracks your task expires on the same two-hour clock. We do not read, copy, index, or train anything on the contents of your documents, and no human at our company looks at them.
What we keep about you
We keep an operational log so we can spot outages and stop abuse. Per task, it records: which tool was used, when it started and finished, how long it took, the size in bytes of the input and output, any error message, and a salted one-way hash of your IP address. It does not record your filenames or anything from inside your documents.
Your raw IP address is never written to that log. It is combined with a secret salt and put through SHA-256, and only a fragment of the result is stored. That is enough to notice that one source is hammering the service and to rate-limit or block it. It cannot be reversed to recover your address.
To be straightforward about a limitation: this operational log is not currently pruned on a fixed schedule, so those hashed records persist for as long as the service runs. We are changing that to a rolling twelve-month window, and will update this page when it ships.
Our web server also produces ordinary short-lived access logs, and our network provider (below) keeps its own connection logs; those are standard infrastructure logs used to keep the service up and secure.
Cookies and browser storage
There are no advertising or tracking cookies on this site. We set one cookie, NEXT_LOCALE, which remembers the language you picked so you are not thrown back to English on the next page.
A few things are kept in your browser’s own local storage. These never leave your device and we cannot read them:
- your light/dark theme preference;
- a short list of tools you used recently, so they are one click away next time;
- if you drew a signature in the editor and chose to keep it, the signature image — so you do not have to redraw it. Clearing your browser’s site data removes it.
Fonts, scripts, and who else is involved
The typefaces on this site are downloaded once when we build it and served from our own domain. Your browser never contacts Google Fonts or any other font host, so no request carrying your IP address goes to a third party just to render text. There are no third-party scripts, embeds, or pixels on any page.
Two companies necessarily handle traffic on our behalf: Cloudflare, which sits in front of the site as a CDN and DDoS filter and therefore sees connection metadata including your IP address, and Hetzner Online GmbH, Germany, which provides the physical server. The server is located in the European Union.
Legal basis and your rights
We process the small amount of data described above on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping a free service available and resistant to abuse. As a company established in Serbia, we are subject to the Serbian Law on Personal Data Protection; because we serve visitors in the European Union, the GDPR applies to that activity as well.
You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to complain to a supervisory authority — in Serbia, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection.
In practice there is very little to exercise these rights against: we have no account tied to you, no email address of yours, and no way to connect a hashed record back to you. If you write to us we will do our best, but we may genuinely be unable to find anything that identifies you, which is the intended design rather than an evasion.
Children
PDFStaple is a general-purpose utility, not a service aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we do with data, we will update this page and move the date at the top. We will not quietly start collecting something new and backdate it.
Who we are
4 SAVE SOFT DOO NOVI SADVardarska 1b 6, 18
Novi Sad, Serbia
PAK 406037
D-U-N-S® Number: 506139874
Privacy questions: [email protected]
Anything else: [email protected]
More about the company and the project on the about page; the rules for using the service are in the terms of service.