About
We see friction. We build the better thing.
PDFSub is the platform that finally puts every PDF and document tool a person or business actually uses in one place - instead of five subscriptions, three desktop apps, and a tab full of free sites that always have a catch.
- Tools
- 84+
- Languages
- 130+
- Banks
- 20,000+
- Funding
- Bootstrapped
Why PDFSub exists
Working with documents on a computer has always meant juggling tools - a different app for editing PDFs, another for converting them, a third for e-signatures, a fourth for extracting data. Over the years I bought endless software, tried every free online tool with mixed results, and stacked subscription on top of subscription, and I still couldn't find every tool I needed in one place. PDFSub is the platform I always wanted: every PDF and document tool a person or business actually uses, in one subscription, on one screen, without paying five different companies to get a single workflow done.
Who's building this
Todd Lahman
I'm a serial entrepreneur and a computer scientist with a minor in cybersecurity. For most of my career I've been building software solutions to problems I kept running into myself.
Years ago - back when getting online meant your modem dialed up the internet like a fax machine calling another fax machine, tying up your only phone line and crawling along at speeds that would make a teenager today close their laptop in disgust - I built a wireless internet service to bypass the phone companies. Wireless gave subscribers an Ethernet-class connection that everyone now takes for granted as broadband, even on their phones. PDFSub follows the same pattern: I look at the friction people put up with every day because nothing better exists, and I build the better thing.
What we work on
PDFSub spans editing, conversion, e-signatures, AI document extraction, OCR, bank-statement conversion across 20,000+ banks, and a public API for developers building on top of the same engine. The blog covers the work in detail - from the engineering tradeoffs in the rendering stack to the workflows accountants run on top of it.
What's next
Public API at parity
The PDFSub API just shipped with HTML→PDF, image, text, and markdown rendering, plus first-party SDKs for ten languages. The next milestones are async jobs and webhooks for long renders, then the full 84+-tool surface.
More document AI
Bank statement extraction, invoice and receipt parsing, and handwritten conversion are live. We're expanding the AI surface to cover more financial-document classes and any other document where extraction beats retyping.
Image editing
Image conversion is already live - HEIC, WEBP, PNG, JPG, plus image-to-PDF and PDF-to-image. The next pass adds in-browser image editing: crop, resize, rotate, watermark, and background removal, with the same privacy-first processing as the document tools.
Compliance and reach
HIPAA-aware processing for healthcare and legal workflows is on the roadmap, alongside continued investment in the privacy-first architecture that already keeps a third of our tools running entirely in your browser.
“I hope what I build makes your work easier so you have more time for the things you actually love to do.”
- Todd Lahman, Founder, PDFSub