Why our tool pages have no ads (and where the ads do go)
Running free tools costs real money: servers, the API, domains, the time to keep 98 browser tools working. Ads are the honest way to pay for that without a paywall. But ads come with ad scripts, and ad scripts are third-party code that can see the page they run on. On a page where you just dropped your tax return, that is not a trade we want to make for you.
So we split the site in two.
Where ads can appear
- The homepage.
- The tool index, the list you browse to find a tool.
- Articles on this blog, like the one you are reading.
These pages never receive your files. They are menus and reading pages. Google AdSense runs there, and visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland get Google's consent message before any personalized ad is shown. You can switch off ad personalization at any time at adssettings.google.com.
Where ads never appear
- Every individual tool page that opens, edits or converts a file, such as Merge PDF, Remove Background or HEIC to JPG.
- The browser AI pages where you chat with your own PDF or spreadsheet.
No ad script, no analytics script from a third party, nothing but the tool and the libraries it needs, all served from our own domain.
It is enforced, not just promised
Here is the difference in the security headers. The homepage allows Google's ad domains:
script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com ...
connect-src 'self' https://pagead2.googlesyndication.comA tool page allows nothing outside our own domain and no outgoing connections at all:
default-src 'self'; script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';
connect-src 'none'; frame-src 'none'; form-action 'none'If someone, including us by mistake, pasted an ad tag into a tool page, the browser would refuse to load it. That is the point: the rule holds even on a bad day.
What about counting visitors?
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without building a profile of you. It tells us which tools get used so we know what to improve. It does not see what you put into a tool.
The trade-off we accepted
The pages people spend the most time on are the tool pages, so keeping ads off them costs us most of the possible ad revenue. We think that is the right call for a site whose whole name is a promise. If the numbers ever force a change, it will be written here and in the privacy policy first, not slipped in.
Want to check any of this? Open a tool, press F12, watch the Network tab while you use it, and read the response headers. We wrote up exactly that test for Merge PDF.