Answers to the common questions about local processing, the free offer, size limits, offline use, permanent redaction and text recognition without a third-party service.
No. Vellum runs entirely in your browser: your PDFs are read, transformed, and saved on your own device, without ever passing through a server. You can check this yourself by opening the “Network” tab in your browser’s developer tools while using a tool — no request containing your file ever goes out.
Yes — all 33 tools in the suite are free, with no file limits and no account required, and they’ll stay that way. That’s possible because processing happens on your device: we don’t have a computing server to fund for every conversion. What we charge for is reserved for organizations bound by professional confidentiality, who need a written processing record and an installation on their own network — not an unlocked feature.
There’s no cap set arbitrarily by Vellum. The only real limit is the memory available on your device: a recent computer handles PDFs of several hundred megabytes without trouble, while a more modest device or a very large file may slow things down.
Yes, largely. Once the page has loaded for the first time, most tools keep working without an internet connection, since all processing happens locally. Only the app’s first load requires network access.
Vellum works on up-to-date modern browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, on both desktop and mobile. Older versions or very niche browsers may be missing some of the technical features we rely on.
Converting a Word file to PDF while faithfully preserving the layout is a hard problem — even server-side engines don’t always solve it well. Doing it properly in the browser, without distorting your documents, is under study. We’d rather not offer a tool than offer one that wrecks your formatting.
Yes. The Unlock tool removes the password and restrictions from a PDF you legitimately have access to (you’ll be asked for the opening password if one exists), and the Protect tool does the opposite: it encrypts your document with AES-256. Like everything else, these operations happen entirely on your device.
Yes — and that’s the key difference from a black rectangle drawn on top, which can be removed or whose hidden text can still be copied. Vellum rasterizes the pages and strips the masked content out of the resulting file: after redaction, the text no longer exists in the document, which you can verify by trying to search or copy-paste it. The trade-off is that the exported document becomes an image, and its text is no longer selectable.
No. The text-recognition engine also runs in your browser, and its files are hosted on our own domain — no third-party service is ever called. Only the engine itself is downloaded, just once; your document, meanwhile, never leaves your device. That’s exactly what most online PDF suites can’t promise.
Vellum is designed and built by an independent studio based in Switzerland, with no funding round and no investors to satisfy. That independence is what lets us keep the essentials free and turn down every tracker and every ad.
Vellum — trente-trois outils PDF gratuits dont le traitement reste sur votre appareil.