You No Longer Need to Sign In for Any Tool, Including File-Based Ones
File-based tools used to require a quick sign-in before your first use. That's gone now — every tool works with no account at all, up to a real free daily limit tracked anonymously in your browser.
Until now, file-based tools (anything that works with a PDF, image, video, or audio file) asked you to sign in before your very first use. Everything else on the site — calculators, generators, converters — never required an account. That distinction is gone now. Every tool works with no sign-in at all, up to a real free daily limit.
Why it required sign-in before
The honest reason: without an account, there wasn't a reliable way to count "this person has used their 10 free uses today." Someone could just clear their browser and reset the count. Requiring sign-in was the straightforward way to make that limit real and fair across everyone using the site.
The problem is that this created a real, specific bad experience: someone lands on a file tool for the very first time, hasn't used anything yet, and gets asked to sign in before they've even tried it. That's the kind of upfront ask that runs directly against the actual point of this site — every file-based tool already processes entirely in your browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere. Asking for an account before you've done anything sends a mixed signal, even though nothing about how the tools work was ever going to change.
What changed
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Every visitor now gets a random, anonymous identifier the first time they use a file-based tool — generated and stored in their own browser, with no personal information attached to it at all. The free daily limit (still 10 uses a day) tracks against that instead of an account. You'll only be asked to sign in once you've genuinely used up today's free uses and want a plan for unlimited access — at that point, the reason is obvious, instead of appearing as an unexplained gate before you've tried anything.
Your free daily uses are tracked per browser, not per person — so if you use a private/incognito window or a VPN that keeps changing your connection, your usage might not be tracked the way you'd expect. For the smoothest experience, a regular browser window works best.
The trade-off, stated plainly
Someone could clear their browser data or use a private window to get more than 10 free uses a day. We're not trying to close that off. The goal of the daily limit has always been fairness, not airtight enforcement — and the trust cost of gating every first-time visitor before they've tried anything was a worse trade than the small number of people who'd bother resetting a browser identifier for a few extra free uses.