About UseTool
UseTool is a collection of 82 file tools for video, images, audio, PDF and office documents. Every one of them works on your device: the file is opened, processed and saved by your own browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server – there is no server that could receive it.
Why it exists
Most online converters work the same way: you upload a file, wait in a queue, download the result and hope the copy on their server is deleted. For a holiday video that is merely slow. For a payslip, a medical report, a contract or a passport scan it is a real risk. UseTool was started to show that the everyday jobs – making a video small enough for WhatsApp, turning iPhone HEIC photos into JPG, merging PDFs, removing a background – do not need an upload at all.
How the tools work
Modern browsers ship the building blocks that used to require desktop software. UseTool uses them directly:
- WebCodecs decode and encode video and audio with the same codecs your browser uses for playback, often hardware-accelerated.
- WebAssembly runs established libraries locally – for example text recognition (OCR), speech-to-text for subtitles, background removal and image upscaling. The models are downloaded once and cached; your files are never sent anywhere.
- Canvas and PDF libraries render, crop, sign and assemble images and PDF pages inside the tab.
- Large files are streamed in pieces and written to the browser’s private storage instead of being held in memory, so multi-gigabyte videos work on ordinary computers.
Because the work happens on your device, speed depends on your device. A phone is slower than a laptop, but the result is the same file you would get anywhere else – and it never left your hands.
What we measure
UseTool counts anonymous events such as “a tool was started”, “it finished” or “it failed, reason: unsupported format”, together with a coarse device class (phone or desktop) and browser family. That is how bugs are found: a failure pattern on one browser shows up in the numbers long before anyone writes an email. File names, file contents, file hashes and passwords are never part of these events. Details are in the privacy policy.
How UseTool is funded
The tools are free and have no watermark, no account and no daily limit. The site is financed by advertising from Google AdSense, shown only after you have made a choice in the consent dialog and only on pages with their own content. You can change that choice at any time via “Ads” in the footer.
How the tools are checked
Every tool has automated tests, and the file-processing paths are verified in real browsers with real media: output files are decoded again and compared, and archive and conversion features that promise exact results are checked with SHA-256 checksums. Failure reports from the anonymous statistics are turned into regression tests so the same bug does not come back.
Who is behind it
UseTool is built and operated by Onur Başıbüyük in Rheine, Germany. It is an independent project, not part of a larger company. The full provider details are in the legal notice (Impressum).
Contact
Questions, bug reports and feature ideas are welcome at basi.onur@gmail.com. If a tool fails on a particular file, a short description of the file type, the browser and the device helps most – please do not send the file itself unless it contains nothing private.