SaaSBox

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SaaSBox is a free, no-account PDF toolkit I built that lets anyone convert, edit, compress, sign, protect, and transform PDF files directly in the browser — no subscriptions, no file limits, no upselling.The project is made up of two parts working together. The frontend is a clean static HTML site with a tool for every common PDF task — things like merging, splitting, compressing, rotating, watermarking, redacting, converting to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPG, and HTML. The backend is a set of 13 specialised Python services, each handling a specific conversion or processing task, deployed as Docker containers on Render and routed through a single Cloudflare Worker.What makes SaaSBox different from tools like SmallPDF or iLovePDF is that I've built it around privacy and simplicity as defaults rather than afterthoughts. Many of the tools — splitting, merging, signing, annotating — process files entirely inside the user's browser using PDF.js and pdf-lib, which means the file never gets uploaded anywhere at all. For the tools that do need server-side processing, files are handled in memory and never written to permanent storage.I built the whole thing without a frontend framework, without a build pipeline, and without requiring users to create an account. The frontend is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — you can open any page directly in a browser and it just works. On the backend I used Flask, PyMuPDF, LibreOffice, Tesseract OCR, and Playwright depending on what each conversion needs, all containerised with Docker.The project is currently running on Render's free tier, which keeps costs at zero while I validate the product. The honest tradeoff is a cold start delay of around 60 seconds if a backend hasn't been used in a while — something I'm upfront about rather than hiding. As usage grows the plan is to move to paid infrastructure and eventually introduce optional features for power users.