€7 a year: what the Convertu subscription actually pays for
Why 41 Convertu tools cost nothing to run, why the other 19 cost real money, and what your €7 a year actually pays for.
You merged two PDFs this morning, a third file lands in the afternoon, and a message tells you the free conversion for today has already been used. Behind it sits a price: €7 a year. Low enough that you start looking for the catch — a quiet auto-renewal, files being resold, a deliberately degraded output for non-subscribers. Here is the detail, with no sales gloss.
Two families of tools, two costs with nothing in common
Of the 60 tools in the catalogue, 41 cost nothing to run. Counting the words in a piece of text, reformatting JSON, working out the VAT on an invoice, generating a password, cropping a photo: it all happens inside your browser's JavaScript engine. The server sends a page and a few dozen kilobytes of code, and then it has nothing left to do. Your own processor does the work. When you use image compression, the file is decoded and re-encoded by your browser's Canvas API — it never leaves the machine you are sitting at.
The other 19 are a different beast. Turning a PDF into a Word document means spinning up a full office-document engine, parsing the file's structure, and rebuilding text blocks and tables while substituting fonts where needed. Re-encoding a video means decoding it frame by frame and then encoding the whole thing again. Cutting a subject out of a photo means running a segmentation model. These operations have one thing in common: they tie up a processor for several seconds — often several dozen for a video a few minutes long — take up memory, write temporary files to disk, and use bandwidth in both directions. Multiply that by a day's worth of visitors and it turns into an invoice. Here is where the line falls, family by family.
| Family | Where it runs | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Text, maths, dates, encoding | Browser | Word counter, VAT calculator, Base64, SHA hash, time zones, text to speech and speech to text |
| Everyday image editing | Browser | Compression, resizing, cropping, rotation, format conversion |
| Web and developer tools | Browser | QR code, colour palette, Markdown ↔ HTML, CSS formatter, slugs |
| PDF (10 tools) | Server | Merge, split, compress, protect, PDF → Word, PDF → JPG |
| Video and audio (4 tools) | Server | MP3 extraction, video compression, container change |
| Heavyweight image work (4 tools) | Server | HEIC → JPG, background removal, watermark, blur |
| Code validation (1 tool) | Server | HTML validator |
That line is not a marketing decision, it is a technical constraint. Chrome and Firefox cannot decode a HEIC file straight off an iPhone, because they ship without a licensed HEVC decoder — Safari is the exception. And rebuilding a Word layout from a PDF stream is not something a browser engine is built to do either. Nothing is sent anywhere, so nothing is billed for the processing itself: 36 of these tools are open to anyone, with no account at all. The five image tools sit inside the subscription.
What the subscription unlocks, and what it does not change
What it unlocks: unlimited use of the 19 server tools, where you otherwise get one free conversion a day, plus five image tools. Nothing else. €7 charged once a year, which works out at roughly €0.58 a month. No commitment: the subscription can be cancelled in one click.
What it does not change, and this matters:
- The quality of the result. The free daily conversion goes through the same engine, with the same settings, and produces exactly the same file as a subscriber's conversion. No watermark, no capped resolution, no first-page-only teaser.
- The browser tools. They run on your own machine: paying speeds nothing up and changes no result, because there is no server-side processing to unlock.
- The need for a connection. A PDF → Word conversion will not work on a train with no signal, subscriber or not. The browser tools, by contrast, only touch the network when the page loads.
- The laws of physics. A video file of several hundred megabytes has to travel up the wire in full before anything can be done to it — and each tool states on its own page the ceiling it accepts. On a typical home broadband connection, it is the upload that dominates the total time, not the processing.
When you should not subscribe
The free daily conversion is more generous than it looks: it asks for no account and no email address, and it resets every day. If you merge a PDF three times a year, you will never have a reason to pay. The same goes if your use stops at text, calculators, colours or web tools: all of that already sits on your side of the screen.
Two other situations where the subscription is the wrong call:
- Industrial-scale processing. If you re-encode dozens of videos a day in production, a local FFmpeg install on a decent machine will be quicker than a network round trip, and will depend on nobody.
- Documents your organisation forbids you to send out. In that case the question is not the price: it is the server tools themselves that are ruled out. That leaves the 41 tools that transmit nothing.
Conversely, you cross the threshold quickly as soon as you chain several operations on one document. Splitting an 80-page report down to the three pages you need, compressing the result, then exporting it to Word: that is already three trips to the server inside the same half hour. It is the chained work, not the monthly volume, that makes the subscription worth having.
Why once a year rather than every month
Annual billing is not a presentational trick to make the price look smaller. It has three concrete effects. First, you make one decision a year instead of twelve silent renewals. Second, the fixed cost of handling a payment weighs heavily on a tiny amount: twelve charges of €0.58 would hand over an absurd share of the total in fees — a single charge is what lets the price sit this low. Third, there is no introductory rate designed to jump at renewal: the second year costs what the first one did.
What happens to your files
For the 41 browser tools, the answer can be checked without taking our word for it: open the Network tab in your browser's developer tools, run a compression or a crop, and watch no request leave with the file. That is the strongest guarantee there is, because it rests on no promise at all.
For the 19 server tools, the file goes up, it is processed, and it is deleted after one hour. That window exists to give you time to download the result again if you close the tab by accident, not to archive anything. The service is published by SOLUTION AS A SERVICE, a company based in Brussels, and the interface is available in six languages.
A useful habit when a document contains sensitive passages: send only what has to be sent. If you only need to work on pages 12 to 14 of a contract, start with the PDF splitter. That first step is a server tool itself, so the contract does go up once — but from then on, the only thing being processed and stored is the three-page extract. The same logic applies to video: trimming it first in your editing software means the twenty minutes nobody needs never make the trip to compression.
The summary, in one line
Two thirds of the catalogue runs on your own machine, and most of it is free because it costs nobody anything. The remaining third puts a machine to work on every click, and costs €7 a year for anyone who uses it regularly. The rest of the time, the free daily conversion is enough. You can browse the full set of tools before deciding, or read the terms of the subscription.