91.5k stars · MIT at the root, with app/proprietary/, app/saas/, engine/ and several frontend directories carved out under separate licences · v2.14.3 (2026-08-06)
About fifty PDF operations in one self-hosted container — nothing leaves the machine.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A self-hosted web application offering around fifty PDF operations — split, merge, compress, convert, OCR, redact, sign, fill forms, rotate — through a browser interface, running entirely on your own hardware. One Docker container, no upload to anybody else.
Why it matters
Two threads in this ledger end in PDFs. Typst (Ed. 8 #7) produces the bilingual lead magnet you will trade for an email address, and it will want compressing before it goes on the site. And Grasppy's whole document-ingest question — Docling (Ed. 3 #9) against Marker (Ed. 9 #9), which Edition 9 asked you to settle on ten real PDFs — needs a corpus of genuinely messy multi-page files, which means splitting, rotating and OCR-ing documents you already have. Doing either on a free upload-your-file website means posting unreleased marketing material and other people's documents to a company you know nothing about. This is the wildcard for a reason: it earns nothing this month, and then one afternoon it saves you.
- Around fifty operations in one container, entirely offline — nothing leaves the machine.
- Very actively released; v2.12.0 in June brought large memory improvements to merging.
- Useful across both products and the video workflow, not just one corner of one of them.
- The licence is no longer simply MIT — see the note above. The root is MIT;
app/proprietary/,app/saas/andengine/are not. - A JVM application that wants real memory headroom. Read Beszel (Ed. 5 #8) before adding it to the Hetzner box.
- Never expose it to the internet unauthenticated. It will happily process whatever anyone uploads, at your expense.
# 1 — PostHog. Nothing to install at all. # Create a free project at https://posthog.com, copy the snippet it # shows you, and load it from CookieConsent's analytics callback # rather than pasting it directly into the page head. # 2 — Polar. Also nothing to install. # Create an account at https://polar.sh, add a product and a price, # copy the checkout link onto the pricing page, then add one webhook # route in FastAPI to hear about payments. SDK docs: https://docs.polar.sh # 3 — CookieConsent, in the same sitting as PostHog. npm install vanilla-cookieconsent # No build step? Use the CDN module documented at # https://cookieconsent.orestbida.com
