Terms of use
The short version
Terms of use rarely earn the time required to read them. Here’s the summary in five bullets so you can move on with your day; the full version is below if you need it.
- Free to use for any lawful purpose. No account, no payment, no usage cap. The output PDFs are yours to use commercially or otherwise.
- Your files stay yours. The architecture means we never receive, store, or transmit them — so we don’t take a content licence, and you don’t need to grant one.
- Provided as-is. The site, tools, and output come without warranty. For high-stakes documents (legal contracts, medical records, financial filings), verify the result before relying on it.
- Don’t use it for unlawful things. Section 5 lists the prohibitions. They’re what you’d expect: don’t scrape, don’t reverse-engineer, don’t use the site to distribute malware, don’t process content you don’t have rights to.
- Liability is capped at €100. We’re a free tool. If something goes catastrophically wrong, our exposure is limited to a small capped amount per user per year — section 12 has the full mechanics.
For specific questions about the terms, email [email protected].
1. Acceptance of these terms
By using PDFluna (the website at pdfluna.com and any tool hosted on it), you agree to these terms of use. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the site. There’s no click-through accept button and no account-creation step at which you’d be asked to sign — that’s an intentional consequence of the no-signup design — but using the site counts as acceptance, in line with how virtually every public website operates.
We may update these terms occasionally; section 16 explains how that works. The “last updated” date at the top of the page reflects the most recent meaningful change. Continuing to use the site after a change counts as acceptance of the updated version.
2. What PDFluna is
PDFluna is a free collection of browser-based tools for everyday PDF operations: editing, compressing, merging, splitting, signing, OCR, and converting between PDF and other formats. The core architectural fact: every tool runs entirely in your browser, using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Files you process are read into your browser’s memory, transformed there, and saved back to your device. Nothing uploads.
The site is supported by display advertising on tool pages. We don’t offer a paid tier and don’t plan to introduce one for the current toolset. The about page has more on the architecture and the team behind the project.
3. Eligibility
You must be at least 16 years old to use PDFluna. The site isn’t intended for users under that age, and we don’t knowingly process data on children. (As covered in our privacy policy we don’t process most user data at all, but section 10 of these terms mirrors the privacy-policy floor for completeness.)
You’re also responsible for confirming that your use of the tools complies with the laws of your country, region, and any jurisdiction where output files are sent. We don’t do compliance checks on your behalf.
4. Your licence to use the tools
Subject to these terms, we grant you a worldwide, non-exclusive, revocable, personal licence to use the tools on this site for your own lawful purposes. The licence:
- Covers use of the tools as they appear on the site, in your own browser, on devices you own or have permission to use.
- Includes the right to use output PDFs for any purpose, including commercial work, client deliverables, archival, and resale of work-product that incorporates them.
- Does not grant rights in our trademarks, logos, copy, design, or composed code beyond what’s strictly necessary to use the site as published. Section 7 covers our intellectual property.
- Does not permit you to rehost, mirror, fork, or operate a derivative service under a different brand. Open-source components have their own licences (section 8); the site as a composed whole is licensed to you for use, not redistribution.
5. Acceptable use
Most of what’s listed here is what you’d expect. The list isn’t exhaustive — these are the categories of behaviour that, if we ever caught ourselves having to deal with them, would prompt a polite-then-firm response. You agree not to:
- Process content you don't own or have permission to process. Copyright applies, even when the file never leaves your device.
- Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the site's source for the purpose of cloning or rehosting it. The open-source libraries we use have their own permissive licences (see section 8); the site as a composed whole is ours.
- Use automated tools (scrapers, bots, headless browsers) to load the site at a rate that affects other users. Single-user automation for personal workflows is fine; high-frequency commercial scraping is not.
- Try to interfere with the site's availability — DDoS, vulnerability probing without coordinated disclosure, exploiting the cookie-consent flow to bypass restrictions.
- Use the tools to process malicious content (malware, phishing PDFs, content designed to exploit PDF reader vulnerabilities) for the purpose of distributing it.
- Misrepresent the source of output files. The PDFs you produce are yours, but you can't claim PDFluna endorsed, certified, or vouches for the content of any specific file.
- Use the tools in violation of any applicable law in your jurisdiction or the jurisdiction where output files are sent.
- Place the site inside an iframe on another domain to disguise the source of the tools, or otherwise mislead users about who provides the service.
We may, without notice, block requests, IP ranges, or specific browsers if we detect abuse from them. If you think you’ve been blocked in error, email [email protected]; we don’t enjoy false positives any more than you do.
6. Your files and content
Because of how the site works, this section is unusually short for a typical software ToS:
- You own your files. The PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and documents you process via PDFluna are yours. They never leave your device, so we couldn’t claim a licence over them even if we wanted to — which we don’t.
- You’re responsible for what you process. If you don’t own a file or don’t have rights to modify it, that’s a problem between you and the rights holder; the architecture means we have neither knowledge of nor responsibility for your specific file content.
- The output is yours too. The PDF (or JPG, PNG, ZIP) that comes out of a tool is yours. We don’t watermark output, don’t claim a credit, and don’t restrict commercial use.
- No DMCA / takedown procedure for user files. We host no user-generated content, so there’s nothing for a typical takedown notice to apply to. If you believe the SITE itself (the published copy, design, or code we wrote) infringes your rights, email [email protected] and we’ll respond promptly.
7. Our intellectual property
The PDFluna name, the crescent-moon logo, the site design, the original copy across tool pages and content pages, and the composition of the open-source libraries into a working toolkit are protected by copyright and (for the brand assets) trademark law. We retain all rights not expressly granted by section 4.
You may not:
- Use the PDFluna name or logo to suggest endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation that doesn’t exist.
- Copy substantial portions of the site copy or design into a competing product.
- Strip our copyright notices from any open-source attribution we include.
Reasonable use under fair-use / fair-dealing doctrines (citation in a blog post, screenshot in a review, brief quotation in a comparison article) is fine and doesn’t need permission.
8. Open-source software
The tools are built on top of open-source libraries with their own licences. None of those licences are altered by these terms; if you use, fork, or redistribute one of those libraries directly, the upstream licence governs your use. The full list of libraries with version pins is on the about page; the libraries we currently use include:
- PDF.js (Apache-2.0) — Mozilla
- pdf-lib (MIT)
- fflate (MIT)
- Tesseract.js (Apache-2.0)
- mammoth.js (BSD-2-Clause)
- SheetJS xlsx (Apache-2.0)
- html2canvas (MIT)
- heic2any (MIT)
Permissive licences across the board. Nothing about these terms restricts your independent use of any of those projects under their own licences.
9. Third-party services and ads
Tool pages display ads served by Google AdSense; the pages also include anonymous analytics via Google Analytics 4 (with Plausible as a cookieless fallback for visitors who reject consent). These are operated by third parties under their own terms and privacy policies; using the site means you also agree to those terms in respect of your interaction with their services.
We don’t endorse, control, or take responsibility for the content of ads. If you click an ad, you go to the advertiser’s site under their terms. If you see an ad that’s misleading or inappropriate, report it via Google’s ad-feedback tool (visible on every ad) and email us at [email protected] so we can flag it on our side too.
10. Privacy
Your privacy is governed by our privacy policy, which is incorporated into these terms by reference. The short version: we don’t see, store, or transmit the files you process; we collect anonymous analytics; we use cookies for analytics + ads (consent-gated for EU/UK visitors); you have a defined set of GDPR/CCPA rights you can exercise via [email protected].
11. Disclaimers — as-is, no warranty
The site, the tools, and any output are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we disclaim:
- Any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
- Any warranty that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or free from viruses or other harmful components.
- Any warranty about the accuracy, completeness, reliability, or quality of any output produced by the tools.
- Any warranty that the site will be compatible with your specific browser, device, file, or workflow.
For high-stakes documents — legal contracts, medical records, financial filings, regulatory submissions — verify the output against the original and against the requirements of the receiving party before relying on it. Browser-based PDF processing is robust for the everyday case but no software is perfect, and we ship honest documentation of each tool’s limitations on its individual page rather than promising universal perfection.
Some jurisdictions don’t allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties; in those cases the disclaimers above apply to the maximum extent permitted by local law.
12. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law:
- No indirect or consequential damages. We won’t be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages arising out of or in connection with your use of the site or any output — including without limitation loss of data, lost profits, lost business opportunities, or substitute-product procurement costs — even if we’ve been advised of the possibility of such damages.
- Aggregate cap of €100. If, despite point 1, we’re found liable for direct damages, our total aggregate liability to you in respect of these terms or your use of the site is capped at one hundred euros (€100) per twelve-month period. The site is free; the cap reflects that proportionality.
- Your sole remedy. If you’re unhappy with the site, the tools, or any output, your sole and exclusive remedy is to stop using the site. The free, no-account architecture makes this instant and reversible.
Some jurisdictions don’t allow limitations on certain liabilities (notably gross negligence, wilful misconduct, fraud, or death/personal injury caused by our negligence); in those cases the limitations above apply to the maximum extent permitted, and nothing in these terms limits liability that can’t lawfully be limited.
13. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless PDFluna and the team behind it from and against any claim, demand, loss, damage, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to:
- Your breach of these terms.
- Your violation of any law or third-party right (including IP, privacy, or contractual rights).
- Your use of the site to process content you didn’t have rights to process.
- Your use of any output in a way that causes injury to a third party.
We’ll cooperate reasonably in any defence and may, at our expense, assume exclusive defence of any matter for which you owe us indemnification, in which case you’ll cooperate with us.
14. Termination
You can stop using the site at any time. Close the tab. That’s the entire termination procedure on your side, and there’s nothing to wind down because there’s no account.
We may suspend or terminate your access to the site without notice if we reasonably believe you’ve violated these terms (especially the acceptable-use clauses in section 5) or if continued access poses a security or stability risk to other users. The disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law, and general-provisions sections survive termination.
15. Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of Ukraine, where the site’s operating team is currently based, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles. For users habitually resident in the European Union or the United Kingdom, mandatory consumer-protection laws of your country of residence still apply where they grant you stronger protection.
We’ll first try to resolve disputes informally. If you have a complaint, email [email protected] with the subject prefix [Legal]; we respond within 30 days. If the dispute can’t be resolved informally:
- EU consumers may use the European Commission’s Online Dispute Resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.
- Other users agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these terms will be brought exclusively in the courts of Kyiv, Ukraine, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. (This applies to the extent permitted by your local mandatory consumer-protection laws.)
You agree that any cause of action arising out of or related to the site must be brought within one (1) year after the cause arises, otherwise the claim is permanently barred.
16. General provisions
16.1. Entire agreement
These terms, together with the privacy policy and cookies policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and PDFluna regarding the site. They supersede any prior agreements or communications.
16.2. Severability
If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, that provision is severed and the remaining provisions stay in full force and effect.
16.3. No waiver
Our failure to enforce any provision isn’t a waiver of our right to enforce it later. A waiver of any term must be in writing to be effective.
16.4. Assignment
You may not assign or transfer these terms without our prior written consent. We may assign these terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets without notice.
16.5. Force majeure
We’re not liable for any failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control: natural disasters, war, terrorism, civil unrest, government actions, internet or power outages, attacks by third parties on our infrastructure or providers’ infrastructure.
16.6. Changes to these terms
We may revise these terms occasionally. The “last updated” date at the top reflects the most recent meaningful change. For substantive changes, we’ll surface a notice on the homepage for 30 days. Continuing to use the site after a change is acceptance of the updated terms; if you don’t accept, please stop using the site.
16.7. Contact
For legal questions about these terms, email [email protected] with the subject prefix [Legal]. For privacy questions, see our privacy policy. For general support, the contact page lists every email address you might need.