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About Utilao

Utilao is a collection of free online tools for everyday tasks — merging PDFs, compressing images, generating QR codes, converting units, running calculators, and more. No account required, no watermarks. Launched in 2026, it is built and maintained by one independent developer: Ivan Daniel.

Who Builds This

Utilao is an independent project, not a company product. Ivan Daniel builds, tests, documents, and maintains every tool, calculator, and guide on the site. There is no editorial team and no outside reviewers — see Editorial Standards for exactly what that does and doesn't mean for the content you read here.

Why We Built This

Many online tool sites make you jump through hoops — create an account, verify your email, choose a plan, decline the upsell — before you can do anything. Utilao's approach is: open the tool, upload your file, get the result. See Methodology for how each tool, calculator, and guide is actually built and checked before publishing.

What We Offer

  • PDF tools: Merge, compress, split, and password-protect PDF files — processed server-side, up to 20MB, no watermark
  • Image tools: Compress, resize, and convert images between JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, BMP, and GIF, plus background removal — processed server-side, up to 10MB
  • QR codes: Generate static QR codes for URLs, plain text, WiFi credentials, email, and phone numbers — download as PNG
  • Unit converters: Length, weight, and temperature — run entirely in your browser, nothing sent to our servers
  • Calculators: Everyday, finance, and health calculators — run entirely in your browser; see each calculator's formula and assumptions in its own page and in Methodology
  • Text, developer, and SEO tools: Word counter, JSON formatter, and other browser-side utilities

How File Processing Works

When you upload a file to a server-side PDF or image tool, here is what happens:

  1. Your file is uploaded over HTTPS (encrypted in transit) to our own server — Cloudflare proxies the connection at the network edge, but the actual PDF/image processing runs on our self-hosted infrastructure, not a third-party conversion API
  2. The file is processed automatically, using established open-source libraries — pypdf, pikepdf, Pillow, and rembg — only to perform the operation you requested. There is no human review, no use of your files to train any model, and no unrelated analysis or indexing of file contents
  3. The output file is made available at a randomly generated, non-guessable download URL
  4. Temporary input and output files become eligible for automatic cleanup after one hour (a scheduled job checks roughly every 15 minutes); actual removal timing can vary with cleanup activity

Unit converters, calculators, the word counter, and the JSON formatter run entirely in your browser. No file or input data from these tools is ever transmitted to our servers.

Privacy, Plainly

Full detail lives in the Privacy Policy; the short version:

  • Uploaded files are processed only to perform the operation you requested, then become eligible for deletion after one hour
  • We do not share file contents with third parties or use them to train machine learning models
  • We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, advertising trackers, or cross-site tracking cookies
  • Our analytics system is self-hosted and records page views with a pseudonymous, one-way hashed visitor identifier — not a cookie and not usable for cross-site tracking. Our web server (behind Cloudflare) also keeps standard access logs for security and abuse diagnostics, on the same retention schedule as the rest of the server. Neither is used for advertising or profiling
  • The application database that powers the site never stores your raw IP address

The Technical Stack

Utilao is built with FastAPI (Python), Jinja2 templates, and SQLite. PDF processing uses pypdf and pikepdf (built on the QPDF C++ engine). Image processing uses Pillow, and background removal runs locally via the open-source rembg library. QR code generation uses the qrcode library. The application is self-hosted on our own server; Cloudflare provides DNS, HTTPS proxying, and edge security in front of it.

PDF password protection uses AES-256 encryption via pikepdf/QPDF, not the older, weaker RC4 algorithm.

Limitations and Fair Use

All tools are free for personal and commercial use, with no paid tier and no watermark. Current limits: PDF tools accept files up to 20MB; image tools accept files up to 10MB. These limits exist for fair access on shared server resources and can change — the current numbers are always shown on each tool's page. Browser-side tools (converters, calculators, text tools) have no file-size limit of ours to hit, since nothing is uploaded to a server.

Automated scripts that repeatedly upload files at high volume are not permitted. For batch processing needs, the underlying libraries (pypdf, Pillow) are open-source and can be run locally without these limits.

Corrections and Reporting Issues

If a tool produces incorrect output, a calculator's formula looks wrong, a guide contains an inaccuracy, or you find a security concern, please report it at smartulethtb@gmail.com — see Contact for what to include. We review reports and fix verified issues, but we don't promise a specific response time. See Editorial Standards for how corrections to published content are handled.

Utilao is an independent site, not affiliated with any of the products it references for comparison or standards purposes.