What ProjectBay is
ProjectBay is a collection of free web tools — 35 of them at the time of writing — covering PDF editing, image compression, developer utilities, calculators, networking, science and education. Every tool runs entirely inside your browser. There is no account to create, no paywall, and no upload step.
The collection grew out of a simple frustration: most “free online tools” either watermark your output, cap you at two files a day, or quietly keep a copy of everything you hand them. A tool that converts an image does not need to see your image on a server, and it is usually cheaper to build it that way.
Why the tools run in your browser
Modern browsers can read a file from your disk with the File API and process it with JavaScript and WebAssembly. That is all most of these tools need. The consequences are worth spelling out:
- Your files never leave your device. Nothing is POSTed to a server, so there is no copy of your document in anyone’s storage bucket and no retention policy to read.
- There is no upload wait. A 300 MB PDF starts being processed the moment you select it.
- It works offline once loaded. Several tools ship a service worker, so they keep working with no connection at all.
The trade-off is that very heavy processing is limited by your device rather than by a server farm. For the tasks here — splitting a PDF, resizing an image, formatting JSON — that is not a practical constraint.
How to use it
Everything is reachable from the home page. Press
Ctrl/⌘ + K to search across
all tools by name, or use the category chips to narrow the grid. Each tool is a
single page with one obvious primary action; there is nothing to configure before
you start.
How ProjectBay is funded
ProjectBay is free to use and supported by advertising on some of its pages. Advertising pays for hosting and development. Because file processing happens locally, no advertiser or ad network receives your documents, your images, or anything derived from them — the ad code has no access to the content you are working on.
Advertising does involve third-party cookies set by the ad network, which is a different question from file privacy and is covered in full in our privacy policy, including how to opt out.
Open source and attribution
Several ProjectBay tools are built on open-source projects, and the licences that require attribution are honoured in full on the relevant tool’s pages and in its repository:
| Tool | Built on | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| PDFBay | BentoPDF | AGPL-3.0 |
| DevBay | IT-Tools | GPL-3.0 |
| ImagePress | Squoosh | Apache-2.0 |
| SketchBay | Excalidraw | MIT |
| CalcBay | CalcDiverse (formulas ported) | Apache-2.0 |
| RollCall | random-name-picker | MIT |
The remainder are original builds. Where a tool is a fork, the upstream project’s licence file is kept in the repository and its attribution appears on the tool’s own pages.
Languages
The interface is available in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish. Language is detected from your browser on first visit and can be changed from the switcher in the header; the choice is stored on your device.
Getting in touch
Bug reports, tool requests and corrections are all welcome — see contact. If you have found a security problem, please say so explicitly in the subject line.