About
PDFRetype turns any document — scans included — into the format you actually need: Word, PDF, Markdown, HTML, text, and more. It's free, it needs no account, and it deletes everything it touches within 24 hours.
Why this exists
Most "free" converters are upload-your-file-and-hope: accounts, watermarks, page limits, and documents that quietly live on someone's server forever. This project takes the opposite bet — a genuinely free tool that treats your documents as radioactive: process them, hand them back, and destroy every trace on a timer.
How it works
Your document is analyzed by a layout-understanding OCR pipeline that reads text (typed or scanned), detects structure — headings, tables, figures, columns — and rebuilds the document in your chosen format. Everything runs on our own server; nothing is sent to third-party AI services.
AI features — coming soon
Chat with your documents, semantic search, one-tap summaries, and whole-document translation are in development. They ship when they meet the same quality bar as conversion — no dates promised — and under the same privacy rules: your files stay in your private workspace and still self-delete after 24 hours.
They will be announced in the release notes on this site when they ship. (We don't run a notify-me mailing list — keeping one would mean keeping a list of email addresses, and the privacy policy promises we never collect those.)
Free, forever
The app is completely free to use. If it ever shows ads to keep the servers running, the core promise stays the same: free conversion, no accounts, and automatic deletion of your documents within 24 hours.
Contact & support
- Email: support@pdfretype.com
- Include what you tried, what you expected, and what happened. Please don't attach sensitive documents.
Credits
Built on excellent open-source foundations, including Docling (layout understanding), RapidOCR & Tesseract (OCR), and LibreOffice (office conversions).