About Toolula

Who makes Toolula

Toolula is built and run as an independent project in Bavaria, Germany. It is a one-person project, not a company with a sales team: the tools, the texts on this site and the answers to support emails come from the same person. The operator details required by German law are listed in the Impressum.

Why the tools run in your browser

Most free online converters ask you to upload the file first. For a holiday photo that may not matter, but people use these tools for contracts, payslips, tax notices, ID scans and invoices. Once such a file sits on someone else's server, you cannot check who reads it, how long it is kept or where it ends up.

Today's browsers are fast enough to merge a PDF, read the text in a scan or convert a video on the device itself, so Toolula does exactly that. There is nothing to upload, no account to create and no file to delete afterwards.

How local processing works

When you open a tool, the page loads the code it needs: pdf-lib and pdf.js for PDFs, Tesseract for text recognition, Mediabunny for video and audio, and ONNX Runtime or MediaPipe for the AI image tools. Several of them are WebAssembly modules, which run at close to native speed. Your file is read into memory through the browser's File API, processed there, often in a Web Worker so the page stays responsive, and the result is created as a download in the same tab.

AI models, such as the one for background removal, are downloaded once and kept in the browser cache. After that the tools also work without a connection. You can check this yourself: open a tool, switch off Wi-Fi and process a file.

What does go over the network

Local processing covers your files, not every request the site makes. The pages and the program code come from our own server; only the translation models, in browsers without a built-in translator, come from a third party (Hugging Face). Google AdSense loads on every page and first shows visitors from the EU, the EEA, the UK and Switzerland Google's consent dialog; cookies for personalised ads are only used after you agree there, and Google Analytics only after you allow it in our statistics notice or in that dialog, as described in the privacy policy. The optional trusted timestamp for digital signatures sends only a hash of the signature to the timestamp service, never the document.

How Toolula is funded

The core tools are free to use, with fair-use limits on the free plan. Hosting and development are paid for by advertising, by voluntary support through Buy Me a Coffee and by Toolula Pro, an optional plan with higher limits and advanced features.