pdfmoa is the PDF part of moatool, a family of free browser tools. It is built and maintained by one independent developer, not a company, and has grown one tool at a time.
Why nothing is uploaded
The files people bring to a PDF tool are usually the sensitive ones: contracts, ID scans, payslips. Uploading those to a stranger’s server "for conversion" never made sense to us. So every pdfmoa tool runs entirely inside your browser. Merging, splitting, compressing, signing and OCR all happen on your own device, and nothing is sent anywhere. Open your browser’s network tab while you work and you will see no upload.
How it stays free
With no server to process files, fixed costs are tiny, which is what lets the tools stay free with no sign-up, quotas or watermarks. Running costs are covered by ads on the pages. Ads sit where they do not interrupt your work, and they have nothing to do with how your files are handled.
How it improves
Tools change based on what real users run into. We removed the paid limit on processing many files at once, because charging for something that costs us nothing to run did not sit right, and we waited to add office-document conversion until it could run in the browser. If something does not work, the page says so. How to use each tool, and where it stops, is written up in the blog (Korean).
Contact
Found a bug, a wrong explanation or a missing feature? Use the contact page. Details on data handling are in the privacy policy.