01Agreement to these terms
These Terms & Conditions (“Terms”) are an agreement between you and FernPDF (“FernPDF”, “we”, “us”) governing your use of the website and PDF tools at fernpdf.joshuaalanfernandes.com(the “Service”). By using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.
If you use the Service on behalf of a company or other organization, you confirm you have authority to bind that organization, and “you” includes it.
02Who operates FernPDF
FernPDF is an independent software project, not a company. It is built and run by one person, and it is free, there is no organisation behind the name, no investors, and nothing here is sold.
There is no public contact address for the Service at present.
The site is hosted by Vercel Inc., which serves it from a global content network. What Vercel receives is described in the Privacy Policy.
03What the Service is
FernPDF provides the document, image, developer, calculator and productivity tools made available through the website from time to time, merging, splitting, compressing, editing and annotating PDFs; converting between formats; extracting text (OCR); generating business documents; and a range of text and calculation utilities. Processing happens locally on your device, so your files are not uploaded to us. How we handle data is described in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.
The document assistant currently runs entirely on your device: it searches the PDF you load, reports document stats, and exports its text, all in your browser. It is not a generative AI model and does not send your content anywhere. AI summaries and chat are labeled “coming soon” and are not available yet; if we ship them, anything that would require off-device processing will be clearly disclosed before it runs. The dashboard and account pages display usage history stored only in your browser, which you can disable or clear at any time. There are no user accounts; the “Log in” affordance is a placeholder for a future optional feature.
04Free use, no account
The core tools are free to use and require no registration. We may introduce optional paid plans in the future; if we do, their pricing and any additional terms will be presented clearly before you pay for anything. Nothing you can do on the Service today incurs a charge.
05Acceptable use
You agree to use the Service lawfully and responsibly. In particular, you will not:
- process documents you do not have the right to use (you are solely responsible for the content of the files you work with);
- use the tools to create misleading or fraudulent documents, such as altering a contract, invoice, or certificate with intent to deceive;
- attempt to disrupt the Service, including probing or attacking the site, or scraping it at a volume that degrades it for others;
- misrepresent FernPDF as the source or endorser of documents you produce with it;
- use the Service to commit identity theft, to forge government documents, credentials, qualifications or official seals, to falsify evidence, to create phishing material, or to distribute malware;
- use the Service to circumvent an access control or a technological protection measure on a document you are not authorised to open;
- use the Service in violation of any law that applies to you.
Because processing runs on your device, what you do with your own documents is your responsibility, and your business. These rules exist to protect the Service and other users, not to police your files.
06Your files stay yours
You retain every right you have in the documents you process with FernPDF. Because your files never reach our servers, we do not (and could not) claim any license, ownership, or right to use, copy, or learn from your content. The output a tool produces from your file belongs to you to the same extent the input did.
Keep your originals. The tools transform copies in your browser’s memory and never modify the source file on your disk, but good practice with any document tool is to retain the original until you have verified the result.
07Our intellectual property
The FernPDF name, logo, site design, and the code that delivers the Service are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual-property laws. These Terms do not grant you any right to use our branding, and you may not copy, resell, or create derivative versions of the Service itself.
The Service is built on open-source software, including PDF.js (Apache License 2.0), pdf-lib (MIT License), and JSZip (MIT License), each of which remains governed by its own license. Nothing in these Terms restricts rights those licenses grant you.
08No professional advice : read this before using the generators or calculators
FernPDF does not provide legal, financial, tax, accounting, medical, or other professional advice, and using it does not create any professional relationship between you and us. Every generator, calculator, and template on the Service is a general-purpose convenience tool. It does not know your circumstances, your jurisdiction, or the rules that apply to you.
In particular, and without limiting the above:
- Business documents. Any document the Service formats for you, an invoice, a quote, a purchase order, a letter, is a layout, not a legal instrument reviewed for your jurisdiction or situation. It may be incomplete or unsuitable for what you need. Have a qualified professional review anything you intend to rely on or ask someone to sign.
- Invoices, receipts, and tax documents. The invoice, receipt, quote, and purchase-order generators produce formatted documents; they do not check tax rates, mandatory fields, numbering rules, e-invoicing requirements, or anything else your tax authority may require. FernPDF does not verify that a document represents a genuine transaction, and does not certify, authenticate, validate, or endorse any document created with the Service. You are solely responsible for the accuracy and legal compliance of any document you issue.
- Financial calculators. Loan, mortgage, tax, interest, salary, and similar calculators produce estimates from the figures you type, using standard formulas and simplifying assumptions. They ignore fees, rounding conventions, local rules, and the actual terms of any real product. Do not use them to make a borrowing, investment, or tax decision.
You rely on any output at your own risk. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for any decision made, document issued, or action taken on the basis of output from the Service.
09Tools that need particular care
Some tools carry consequences that a normal “check your output” warning does not adequately cover. By using them you confirm you understand the following.
- Redaction is not a guarantee of removal. The redaction tool covers content in the output file, but no automated tool can promise that every copy of sensitive information, in metadata, embedded objects, attachments, revision data, or an underlying text layer, has been eliminated. Never rely on this tool alone to remove classified, privileged, or personal information before disclosure. Inspect and verify the output independently.
- Metadata removal can carry obligations. Stripping metadata, EXIF data from a photograph, or properties from a PDF, is often entirely legitimate, and removing your own GPS coordinates before publishing a picture is a good reason to do it. But metadata can also carry rights-management or attribution information, and removing or altering that without authority is separately regulated in several jurisdictions. Removal may also destroy provenance that matters for evidentiary, licensing, or regulatory purposes. Confirm you are entitled to remove what you are removing.
- Password protection is not strong security. PDF passwords can be removed by widely available software and are only as strong as the password you pick. Do not treat a protected PDF as a substitute for real encryption or secure transfer of confidential material.
- We do not provide a way to remove protection from someone else’s PDF. Remove PDF Password decrypts a file using the open password you supply, so it works only on a document you can already open, and it refuses any PDF that never asked for a password. It does not crack, guess, or recover a password, and nothing on the Service will open a file you cannot. Do not use any part of the Service to circumvent an access or copy control on a document you are not authorised to open, which may be unlawful under the anti-circumvention provisions of copyright law where you are.
- Signatures. The Service places a graphical image of a signature onto a page. It does not verify identity, issue certificates, validate signatures, produce an audit trail, or make a document tamper-evident, and it is not a qualified or certified electronic-signature service. Many laws do not deny an electronic signature legal effect merely for being electronic, but particular documents and jurisdictions impose their own formalities, check what yours actually requires.
10Who may use the Service
You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service, and at least 16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf. We do not knowingly permit use by children below these ages.
You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under any applicable sanctions or export control laws, or if you are located in a country or territory subject to comprehensive trade sanctions. You confirm you are not on any restricted-party list.
11Data your browser keeps, and losing it
Several tools, the notepad, sticky notes, saved preferences, and any activity history you leave enabled, save data in your own browser’s local storage. That data is not backed up anywhere, is not synced between devices or browsers, and we cannot recover it.
It disappears if you clear your browsing data, use private browsing, switch browser or device, or if the browser evicts it to reclaim space. Do not use these tools as your only copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. Export or copy anything important elsewhere.
12Third-party software and links
The Service is built with open-source components, which remain the property of their authors and are used under their respective licences. Those components are provided by their authors without warranty, and nothing in these Terms extends any warranty to them.
The Service may link to third-party sites we do not control. We are not responsible for their content, practices, or policies, and a link is not an endorsement.
13Copyright and abuse complaints
We do not host, store, or transmit user documents, processing happens on your device, so in the ordinary case there is no file for us to remove. If you believe the Service itself infringes your rights, or that someone is using it in a way that harms you, there is no published reporting address at present. Note also that because we do not hold your documents, our options would in any case be limited to our own code and service, we cannot remove a file we never received.
14Feedback
If you send us suggestions, bug reports, or ideas, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free right to use them to improve the Service, with no obligation of confidentiality or compensation. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential, and never send us a document or its contents, we do not want it and have no way to protect it.
15Disclaimer of warranties
The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, and non-infringement.
Document processing is inherently imperfect: compression involves quality trade-offs, format conversion (PDF to Word, OCR) can lose layout or misread text, redaction may not remove every trace, and results vary with the input file. Always verify the output before relying on it, especially for legal, financial, medical, or official documents. We do not warrant that any output will be accurate, complete, current, lawful, or suitable for any specific purpose.
We also do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free; that defects will be corrected; that it is compatible with your device, browser, or files; or that processing will preserve the integrity of any file. Because the tools run inside your browser, their behaviour depends on software and hardware we do not control. Keep an unmodified copy of every original file. No advice or information you obtain from us creates any warranty not expressly stated here.
16Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, FernPDF will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or business interruption, arising from your use of (or inability to use) the Service, even if we have been advised such damages are possible.
This exclusion covers, without limitation: loss or corruption of documents or data; inaccurate, incomplete, or failed output; information that redaction did not remove; decisions taken on the basis of a generated document or a calculated figure; claims by third parties about documents you produced;; and any claim arising from a document you issued that proved inaccurate or non-compliant.
The Service is free and processes your documents on your own device, so you keep control of your files and your copies of them. Because of that, you are responsible for keeping your originals and for checking any output before you rely on it.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for intentional misconduct, and for any mandatory right or remedy available to you as a consumer under the law of your country of residence. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties or of certain damages, so parts of these sections may not apply to you.
Subject to the paragraph above, and to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you have paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, which, while the Service is free, is nil, and (b) US $50.
17Your responsibility for third-party claims
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, you are responsible for a claim brought against us by a third party to the extent it results directly from your unlawful use of the Service, your material breach of these Terms, or your infringement of that third party’s rights.
This does not apply to the extent a claim results from our own negligence, fraud, intentional misconduct, or violation of law, nor to any regulatory fine imposed on us for our own conduct, nor to anything applicable law does not permit you to take responsibility for. It does not cover ordinary use of the tools, or output that simply turned out to be inaccurate.
Where we seek to rely on this section we will give you reasonable notice of the claim, will cooperate reasonably with you, and will not settle in a way that imposes a non-monetary obligation or an admission of liability on you without your agreement, except where the law requires it. Nothing in this section limits any mandatory consumer right or remedy.
18Availability and changes to the Service
We work to keep the Service fast and available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted operation. We may add, change, or remove features, and may suspend or discontinue the Service in whole or in part at any time. Because nothing of yours is stored with us, discontinuation cannot cost you any data.
19Termination
You can stop using the Service at any time. There is no account to close. We may restrict or refuse access to anyone who violates these Terms, including by technical means such as blocking abusive traffic. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive (ownership, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity, governing law) survive any termination.
20Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of India, except to the extent that mandatory consumer-protection or other mandatory laws of your country or place of residence apply and cannot lawfully be excluded by a choice of law.
Subject to those mandatory rights, the courts of India have jurisdiction over disputes arising from these Terms. This does not prevent you from exercising a right you have under applicable law to bring a claim before a court or other forum in your own country, nor from complaining to a regulator, consumer authority, or other competent body.
Before starting formal proceedings, please email us, most issues can be resolved in a reply or two.
21Changes to these terms
We may revise these Terms as the Service evolves. When we do, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page, and for material changes we will post a prominent notice on the site. Continuing to use the Service after changes take effect means you accept the revised Terms. The current version always lives at fernpdf.joshuaalanfernandes.com/terms.
22How you accept these terms
On your first visit we show a notice summarising the key points and asking you to confirm that you agree to these Terms and the Privacy Policy. Clicking “I agree” forms this agreement. Your browser stores which version you accepted and when, so you are asked once rather than on every visit; that record lives on your device and is not transmitted to us.
If we make a material change to these Terms we publish a new version and ask you to agree again. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. Continuing to use it after accepting a version means those Terms apply to your use.
23General
Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service, and replace any earlier understanding on the subject.
Severability. If a court finds any provision unenforceable, that provision is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed if it cannot be, and the rest remains in full force.
No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it, and does not stop us enforcing it later.
Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition, or transfer of the Service.
Events outside our control. We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by something beyond our reasonable control, including network or hosting failures, outages at third-party providers, changes in browser behaviour, and acts of government.
No agency. These Terms do not create a partnership, joint venture, employment, or agency relationship between us.
Language. These Terms are written in English. Any translation is provided for convenience, and the English version governs.
24Contact us
These Terms have no published contact address. For how data is handled, see the Privacy Policy.