About OwnFile

OwnFile exists because converting a file should not require handing it to someone else's computer.

The problem

Search for a way to turn an iPhone photo into a JPG and you will find dozens of services that will do it — after you upload the photo to their servers. Most are perfectly honest. But you are still transmitting a personal file to an organisation you know nothing about, accepting whatever their retention policy says today, and trusting that it will not change.

For a great many people this is not a theoretical concern. Medical records, legal documents, passport scans, commercially sensitive designs, and photographs of children all get converted every day, frequently on services chosen from the top of a search results page in under ten seconds.

The approach

Modern browsers can do this work themselves. Between the Canvas API and WebAssembly, essentially every image conversion people actually need can run on your own device, at speeds that often beat a round trip to a server.

So that is what we built. No upload, no account, no queue, no file size cap, no daily limit. Not as a generous free tier that will be withdrawn later — those constraints simply do not apply when your own hardware does the work.

How this stays free

Serving a conversion costs us nothing beyond sending you a static page, because your device performs the conversion. That means we do not need to meter usage, gate features behind an account, or convert you into a subscriber to cover a compute bill. The site is supported by unobtrusive advertising, and we will never fund it by doing anything with your files.

What is next

Image conversion came first because it is what people need most. Audio and video are next — browsers gained the ability to handle those locally relatively recently, and it is the area where the difference between local and server-side processing matters most, since those files are the largest and the most personal.

Suggestions and bug reports are welcome at hello@ownfile.app.