About Klonum

What this is

Klonum is 10 everyday utilities — PDF merging and conversion, image resizing and compression, a QR generator and a password generator. They are the jobs most people need a few times a year and would rather not install software for.

How it works

Each tool is a web page that does its work locally. When you choose a file, the browser hands the page a reference to it; the conversion then happens in JavaScript and WebAssembly on your own machine, and the finished file is written straight to a download. There is no upload step, because there is nowhere for the file to be uploaded to — the site is a set of static pages with no application server behind it.

You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the network panel, and convert something: you will see the page load and then nothing further.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no account to create. Running the site is cheap precisely because the work happens on your device rather than on hardware somebody has to rent.

Where the limits are

Browser-based processing has real constraints and it is better to say so plainly. Very large files are limited by your device’s memory rather than by a server’s. Some formats cannot be decoded by a browser at all. And a few operations — particularly deep PDF optimisation — simply cannot match what a dedicated desktop application does. Where a tool cannot do something well, it says so rather than producing a poor result quietly.

Status

This is an early build, under active development. Tools, copy and design are all still changing.