Built a PDF editor last week. It was way easier than I expected.

Hey, I'm Ashton.

I finished it on a Thursday night and just sat there for a minute feeling kind of stupid.

Not because it was hard. Because it wasn't. I'd been putting this off for months thinking it'd be this huge thing, and then it just worked, and my first thought was wait, that's it? That's the thing people are charging monthly for?

I've paid for one of these before. Needed to fix a typo on a contract, one word, and I'm sitting there with a credit card form open at eleven at night because the free version would only stamp a watermark across the page. I remember being genuinely annoyed. Not at the price, it wasn't much. At the fact that they knew I'd pay. That's the whole product. Not the software. The moment you're stuck.

And now I've built the same thing in a week and I can't stop thinking about that night.

Look, Adobe I get. But there are dozens of these now. Your email first. Three files an hour. Watermark unless you upgrade. None of that exists because the engineering is expensive. It exists because you need it right now and they know it.

Here's what actually bothers me though, and it's not the money.

Somewhere there's a kid who can't turn in an assignment because ten dollars a month is real money where they live. On a document they already have. On a computer they already own. That's not a business model to me at that point, that's just a toll booth someone built on a road that was already there.

And it's not only PDFs. Compressing an image. Converting a file. All this tiny stuff, priced like it's hard, and it isn't. I know it isn't. I just checked.

Someone's going to bring up open source. Fine, but go watch your mom try to install one. Which build. What's a dependency. Why does my Mac say unidentified developer. She's out by step three and she's not coming back.

The software is free. Getting to it isn't. That gap is where everyone's making money.

So I built the boring version. Browser only. No install, no signup, nothing uploaded. Your file never leaves your machine, which means I never see it and never pay to store it, which is the only reason I can keep it free.

It's not out yet. Still cleaning up. Soon.

And no, I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart. There'll probably be a banner somewhere, maybe a donate button down the line. I've got bills. But the tool stays free and unlimited and that part isn't negotiable, because the whole reason I'm building it is that I was on the other side of that credit card form and it sucked.

Anyway. Tell me if you think I'm wrong about this.

And if you're paying for something right now that you suspect shouldn't cost anything, say it. I want to know how long that list gets.