Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

Me and my buddy run a small indie dev studio, and a while back we got frustrated with how most PDF scanner apps feel — clunky UX, subscriptions everywhere, ads, and in some cases your documents get uploaded who-knows-where (for example, incidents reported leaks by TechRadar and Fox News).

So we built our own PDF scanner & editor — lightweight, privacy-first, and (hopefully) not annoying to use. No ads, no subscriptions. Most features are free — a couple of advanced tools require a one-time unlock. All core features run 100% offline with on-device processing.

The main features are built for everyday workflows:

Scan documents — auto edge detect, live corner adjust, batch multi-page Fill and sign forms — reusable signatures, flatten for secure sharing OCR text recognition — preserves layout, searchable PDFs or clean text export (supports 18 languages, e.g., English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, etc.) Edit OCR-detected text — adjust or fix recognised text Page tools — reorder, rotate, duplicate, delete, extract pages Annotations and highlights — comments, text notes, custom watermarks Folder organization — custom folders, drag-and-drop move/rename Everything runs locally — no accounts, no tracking, no upload processing. You can download an AI model to your device (one-time download — it stays cached), and then:

- ask questions about a document - summarise sections or chapters - extract key points or data - turn long documents into quick notes - After the model is installed, all Chat PDF processing happens fully offline on your device.

The app is free to download, and most features are free (scanning, OCR, signatures, annotations, editing, etc).

We wanted to keep the essential tools free, and only charge once for a few advanced features.

We also put together a YouTube playlist with short feature walkthroughs.

You can find the app here: https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/pdf-master-scan-edit-sign/id67...

We’d really appreciate feedback — especially on the Chat PDF feature (usefulness, speed, UX, edge cases, things it should do better). If you try it and have suggestions, we’re actively improving the app based on user feedback.

> make millions

How? Who?

Most of them are freemium, so they're balancing resources funded by subscriptions against the majority free user usage.

And is this local first (as it says on the website) or local only?

How does it fare with PDFs consisting entirely of images? Any PDF tool was struggling with compressing a passport scan (made with iPhone so might've contributed somehow, knowing Apple and PDFs) I had to cut down in size. Ended up using ImageMagick cause any Ghostscript based tool couldn't get it below 7 MBs from the original 28MB which, although, pretty good, was still too high and I could tell there was still plenty of detail that could be discarded without losing the eligibility of the document. I had to compress it with ImageMagick at the end, cut it down from 28MB to 3MB.

Also does Adobe have some kind of patent/copyright on PDF forms? I don't think I saw any free tools that can edit fillable fields / tables in PDFs. I don't see any mention of forms in the Suite section of your app either. Is it just stupidly difficult / annoying to implement ?

Well, fine if it helps other users. Not sure I’m the expected audience.

Due to pdf popularity there is a lot of demand for pdf processing tools. And the format is so complex that there are many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing. That's why these "Hello World" projects usually make Top 5 on HN, and one of the upvotes is usually from me.