Merge-pdf.app – A free, privacy-first PDF Merging tool (ryansouthgate.com)

I used to use the other free online services, which send my files to their servers in order to perform the processing.

I moved to using a docker container when I became concerned about privacy (I merge a lot of invoices and financial documents)

So I built my own, free, privacy centric version

Nice exercise, and as a local solution obviously better than all this "give your data and trust me" stuff. But why must everything nowadays be a browser-based tool? I'm still happy with tools like pdfunite from https://poppler.freedesktop.org/

Love seeing more privacy-first tools in this space. One thing I've learned building PrivaVault (encrypted doc management, launching this weekend) is that users often underestimate how much metadata leaks even when the content is processed locally. For PDF tools specifically, creation timestamps, software versions, and author info can persist through merges unless explicitly stripped. Would be curious if merge-pdf.app handles metadata sanitization – it's one of those edge cases that matters a lot for privacy-conscious users but isn't always obvious at first glance.