About SizeMyPDF

What this site is

SizeMyPDF is a free tool for compressing PDF files to a specific size. It exists because the common case — "this form will not accept anything over 200 KB" — is handled badly by most compressors, which offer vague quality sliders instead of the one number you actually care about.

Why it runs in your browser

Every other compressor uploads your document to a server, processes it there, and asks you to trust a privacy policy about what happens next. That is a genuinely bad deal when the document is a passport scan, a bank statement or a signed contract.

SizeMyPDF does the work on your own device in plain JavaScript. There is no upload endpoint. There is no storage bucket. There is no server that could be breached, subpoenaed or sold, because there is no server in the path at all.

You do not have to take that on faith. Load the page, disconnect from the internet, and compress a file. It will still work — from your second visit onwards, when the service worker has cached the two libraries the tools need. On a very first visit those still have to be fetched, so try it once online first.

How the site is funded

Hosting is paid for by advertising. The ads are clearly marked, kept away from the tool itself, and never disguised as download buttons — a pattern common on free file-tool sites that this one deliberately avoids.

The ads do track you, and the tool does not. Those are two different claims and it would be dishonest to let the first hide behind the second. Your documents are never transmitted — that is enforced by there being no upload endpoint at all. But the advertising is served by Google, which sets cookies and profiles visitors the way it does everywhere else. If that matters to you, an ad blocker will not stop any tool on this site from working, because nothing here depends on the ads loading.

There is no premium tier, no account, no file size cap and no watermark, because none of those would make the tool better; they would just make it worse in a way that pressures you to pay.

Limitations, stated plainly

• Target Size mode flattens text. Guaranteeing a hard byte limit requires converting pages to images. Text stops being selectable. Lossless mode avoids this but cannot promise a specific size.
• No OCR. The tool does not add a searchable text layer to scans.
• Encrypted PDFs are not handled. Remove the password yourself first; bypassing document encryption is deliberately out of scope.
• Long documents depend on your device. There is no server limit. What costs memory is page count, not megabytes — every page is held as an image while it is worked on — so a 300-page scan can exhaust a phone while a 100 MB single-page poster is trivial.

Contact

Corrections, bug reports and feature requests are welcome via the contact page.