PDFs are a versatile digital document you can share with anyone on just about any device with a screen. Easy to view, yes, but try to edit them or convert them to or from another format and you’re usually stuck with combing the web for solution only to find user unfriendly, badly designed and often expensive tools.

Enter Smallpdf

In light of this problem, a team of three Swiss guys created Smallpdf with the belief that simple software solutions should be made affordable. Starting with the first app, Compress PDF, the platform quickly grew to twelve web apps helping solve the most common issues people run into with PDF documents. Some of the simplest issues dealing with PDFs are not so simple to solve for the average user. Regular people are often presented with a problem that they weren’t expecting and don’t have the time to spend figuring out how to use another piece of software. By focusing on simplicity for non-technical users by cutting down choosable options to the bare minimum and presenting clean, easy to understand design, Smallpdf created the first PDF tool you will actually enjoy using.

Common Problems, Elegant Solutions

The Compress PDF function was designed with a formula that would allow for the most reduction in size while keeping the best level of quality in the document. The resulting files are reduced to as much as 100 times smaller and nearly indistinguishable to the original document.

Adding the Spilt PDF, Merge PDF and Unlock PDF gave users the ability to share their documents the way they want to share them.

PDFs are hard to edit, unless it’s created as a form they will remain static and unchangeable unless they can be converted to another, more customizable and widely used format, the most common of course being Microsoft Office documents. The PDF to Word, Excel and Powerpoint give users this ability with ease and on the off chance a user wants to create a PDF from an Office file without wanting to open up a Microsoft program Smallpdf allows you to do that too.

Last but not least is the PDF to JPG and JPG to PDF functions. What is interesting about PDF to JPG in particular is that you can extract just the images from the document to convert into JPGs in case you only need the images and not the text. Despite the name, JPG to PDF can actually handle most popular image file types and convert them to PDF.

Startup Ethos

When trying to decide how to build the site they decided to reflect on three important aspects: reliability, security and simplicity. From the beginning, an intuitive and reliable user experience was and remains the highest priority. The second priority was accessibility, which meant keeping the service web based, free of charge and in over a dozen languages with plans to add more in the near future.

The result, a true Swiss Army Knife of web tools that give users only what they need and all for free. Launched in 2014 they have climbed to nearly five million unique visitors per month Smallpdf and are quickly becoming one of the top choices for online PDF tools.

What Comes Next

Today the team’s main focus is on the market growth, continued updates of the platform, evolution of the design and improvements in performance and reliability. However there are many interesting ideas for future additions to the the toolset which may see launch in the coming months.