For a rental application
A rental file is prepared once, sent out ten times.
In Switzerland the same rental file goes out to several letting agencies within days: ID, payslips, a debt-collection extract, sometimes an employer’s confirmation. These documents are sensitive, need to fit in one PDF under a set size, and are worth preparing once rather than rebuilding for every submission. Three concrete moments, settled in the browser — your documents go nowhere. The “Assemble a dossier” tool starts from the list a letting agency asks for and returns a single PDF: cover page, contents, page numbers, cleaned-up photos and an adjusted size.
Three moments in the file
What trips up the file before it is sent, agency after agency.
An ID card photographed at an angle
Laid on the kitchen table, the ID card comes out tilted, with a glare on the chip and a background that eats into the edges. An agency handling forty applications for one flat will not linger over that one. Scan it with the phone camera, straighten the image and lighten the background instead of retaking the photo ten times.
“One PDF only, please, and no more than X MB”
Some agencies spell it out in the listing or the reply email: one file, not five separate attachments. Bring ID, payslips and confirmations together in the order requested, then compress the whole if it is over the stated limit — the size is measured on the file actually produced.
Three months of payslips, one line would have done
A payslip shows income, but also a social-security number, an address, sometimes allowances that concern nobody but the employer. It gets sent as is, out of habit. Redaction genuinely removes those lines from the file produced, rather than covering them with a black rectangle that a copy and paste makes readable again.
Why it is free, and why that matters here
Online PDF suites send your files to their servers: that computation costs them money, so they ration it — a few files a day, a watermark, an account to create, a subscription at the end of it. VellumPDF does the computing on your device. There is no server to pay for, so there is nothing to ration: no quota, no account, no watermark. For a file that contains an ID and financial documents, that matters more than elsewhere: nothing is transmitted, so there is nothing to delete afterwards, here or with anyone else.
The six useful moves
What you will actually do.
Photograph a document with your phone
Use the camera in the browser to capture an ID or a confirmation letter, with no app to install.
Scan with your camera →Straighten a crooked scanned page
Set a document photographed at an angle upright, a quarter turn at a time.
Straighten scan orientation →Clean up a blurry or grey scan
Whiten the background and boost the contrast of a scanned document so it stays legible once the agency prints it.
Enhance a scan →Bring every document into one PDF
Assemble ID, payslips, the debt-collection extract and confirmations in the order requested, as a single document.
Merge PDF →Redact what was not asked for
Remove a social-security number, an address or an amount from the file produced, rather than covering it.
Redact PDF →Bring the file under the stated limit
Bring the weight down at the quality level you choose, until it clears the maximum size set for email.
Compress PDF →What VellumPDF does not do
VellumPDF does not check that your file contains every document the agency asked for, and does not fill in any form for you. It keeps nothing: close the tab without downloading the result and nothing remains. That is the trade-off of local processing — and it is exactly what guarantees that no copy of your ID is sitting on somebody else’s server.
A vacant flat rarely stays vacant for long.
The rental market leaves little time to rebuild a file. If VellumPDF saved you from sending an unreadable or rejected file, the most useful thing you can do is tell the people preparing the same file. The site is free for everyone and will stay that way: no account to create, no app to install, no paid tier that unlocks a tool.
VellumPDF in detail: see our privacy page, or the case of applicants.