Privacy Policy

Last updated: 13 September 2026

The short version

Your files never leave your browser. Every PDFSpark tool processes documents on your own device. We don't upload, receive, store or look at your files, and we don't use advertising, analytics or tracking cookies. We collect only what we need to run accounts and payments, and we never sell it.

Who we are

PDFSpark ("we", "us") is responsible for the personal information described in this policy. You can reach us at [email protected].

What we collect

If you create an account

Your email address and (optionally) your name.
Your password, stored only as a salted bcrypt hash.
If you sign in with Google: your Google account's email, name and profile picture.
Your plan, the date it ends (for Pro), when you last signed in, and a daily count of operations used (to apply the free limit).

If you buy a plan

A record of the purchase: your email address, the plan, price, date, status and the BTCPay invoice ID. Payment happens on our own BTCPay Server; we never handle card details, and Bitcoin payments are visible on the public blockchain by their nature.

If you contact us

Your name, email address and message.

Everyone

Anonymous, aggregated counts of how often each tool is used per day and "was this helpful" votes. These contain no personal information.
Cookieless visitor statistics from Cloudflare Web Analytics: pages viewed, the referring site, country and browser type, counted in aggregate. It sets no cookies and doesn't follow you across sites.
Technical data such as your IP address and browser type, which our servers and Cloudflare process to deliver pages, apply rate limits and prevent abuse. We don't store IP addresses in our database or use them for profiling, and technical logs are short-lived.
If you use the tools without signing in, a count of today's uses from your connection, to apply the free daily limit. It's stored against a one-way code made from your IP address (for IPv6, the network part) and a random key that is created each day and kept only in our server's memory, never saved. Once the day is over the key is gone, and nobody, including us, can link the count to an address. Counts are deleted the next day. Our database backups may hold older counts until the backups expire, but without the key those can't be linked to anyone either.

To detect failures, we retain grouped error counts for 30 days: error type, tool or route category, release, and timestamps. Reports never include exception messages, stack traces, file names, file contents, page text, account identifiers or IP addresses. Shared files remain on your device in temporary browser storage and expire after one hour.

What we don't collect

Your documents, their contents, file names or metadata.
Advertising identifiers, cross-site tracking data, or analytics cookies.

How we use it, and why we're allowed to

To provide the Service you asked for (performing our agreement with you): running your account, applying your plan, processing payments and sending service emails such as welcome messages, password resets, receipts and renewal reminders.
To keep the Service secure and working (our legitimate interest): rate limits, abuse prevention, and anonymous usage and visitor statistics.
To meet legal obligations: keeping purchase records for tax and accounting.
With your consent: signing in with Google, which you can stop using at any time.

We don't sell or rent your personal information, and we don't use it for advertising.

Services we rely on

Hetzner Storage Box — stores encrypted off-site recovery copies of our databases. The encryption credentials remain with us.
Hosting — our website, database and mail server run on a server we rent from a hosting provider.
Cloudflare — delivers the website, protects it from attacks and provides our cookieless visitor statistics (Cloudflare Web Analytics). Requests pass through Cloudflare's network, which processes your IP address and request details for these purposes.
BTCPay Server — open-source payment processing that we host ourselves.
Email delivery — account emails are sent from our own mail server.
Google — only if you choose "Sign in with Google".

These providers may process data in countries other than your own.

How long we keep it

Account data is kept until you delete your account.
Purchase records, including the email used at checkout, are kept for as long as tax and accounting rules require, even after an account is deleted.
Password reset links expire after an hour and are deleted shortly after.
Contact messages are deleted when they're no longer needed.
Local database backups are kept for up to 14 days. Encrypted off-site recovery copies are retained on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule for up to 12 months. Deleted account information may remain in those recovery copies until they expire; the copies are used only for recovery.

Your rights

Depending on where you live — for example in the European Union, the United Kingdom or California — you may have the right to access, correct, delete or get a copy of your personal information, and to object to or restrict how we use it. You can delete your account yourself from the dashboard; for anything else, email [email protected] and we'll reply within 30 days. We won't treat you differently for exercising these rights.

If you're unhappy with how we handle your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.

Security

Connections to PDFSpark are encrypted with HTTPS, passwords are stored only as salted hashes, and account and payment records stay on servers we control. No system is perfectly secure, but because your documents never reach us, a breach of our servers can't expose them.

Cookies

We only use cookies that are needed to keep you signed in and protect the site. See our Cookie Policy.

Children

The Service isn't directed at children under 16 and we don't knowingly collect their information.

Changes and contact

We'll post changes here and email registered users about significant ones. Questions: [email protected].