Smallpdf reaches 10 million monthly users

PDFs are lovely, aren’t they? They give your documents a proper, professional feel. They’re like the digital version of a bound book.

Once everything is complete, no more changes to make, off it goes to whoever it is who’s important enough to be bequeathed a PDF’d doc.

But that’s where PDFs can fall down. They can be big, they might need some serious editing in which case you’ll need to convert to an XLSx or DOCx or JPEG, they might need locking or unlocking or signing.

To actually DO anything with PDF can be quite the hassle, but remains evidently worth it as PDF is still way ahead of competitor formats as the most popular for exchanging information.

Hence, Smallpdf’s climb to within touching distance of the top 1000 most visited sites. The site is not only one of those endearing internet companies which was started off by some mates, funded by donations and has a nice little footer at the bottom of the page:

Made with ♥ for the people of the internet.

It’s also THE site that allows you to do anything you might conceivably want to do with a PDF. The free model offers all of Smallpdf’s core features, restricted to two documents an hour and up to 5GB in file size. The limitless premium model starts at just $4 a month.

Moreover, it’s a very well designed site which successfully imparts the company’s three key principles: reliability, security and simplicity. I like a pretty website as much as the next guy – but it’s more than aesthetics, the websites sleek simplicity somehow engenders a sense of immediate familiarity. One of those sites that opens up and you think “yeah, I know how this works. Drag and drop, right?”

The team at Smallpdf have also clearly focused on the site’s foundations as well. They can guarantee full privacy by virtue of their encryption process and, just to be sure, they delete all files from their servers within an hour. And those servers are busy, over a hundred of them capable of taking files directly from your Dropbox or Google Drive and processing up to a million documents each day.

“Traditional PDF software way over-complicates the user experience so we wanted keep it simple for the 95% of the users who want to use core PDF editing features with efficiency and simplicity”, said Manuel Stofer, Smallpdf Co-founder. “The Smallpdf team is delighted to see how many people are using our service. This support has allowed us to grow from a three-man donation-led team just four years ago to the leading PDF software on the market today”.

Whilst Adobe is the leading PDF software, it is very feature heavy and is not particularly user-friendly, many competitors also require desktop software. Smallpdf has ten million monthly users and has been translated into twenty languages worldwide. And they’re still going strong, adding more features, with Split PDF a recent addition and Edit and eSign PDF functionality in beta testing. Onwards and upwards, folks.