Everything happens inside your browser, on your own computer or phone: converting a file in Convert, editing a photo in Photo, transcribing a recording in Transcribe, cutting a film in Video, making and mixing music in Music, and working on PDFs, documents, notes, slides and sheets in Docs. The work is done 100% locally, and your file is never uploaded: it is not copied to our server or to any cloud service, and we never see it. Closing the tab discards it.
You can check this. Every page comes with a security policy that tells your browser not to connect to anyone else’s servers; the one page that does is the checkout, which connects to Stripe to take a payment. Our own server has no address that accepts a file, and your browser’s developer tools list every request a page makes.
Music uses your microphone only when you arm a track to record, and your browser asks you first. What it hears stays on your device and is never sent anywhere.
Music uses MIDI devices only when you arm an instrument track; nothing is sent anywhere.
The tools that do the work are files on this site: the video converter, the PDF reader and writer, the readers for Word, spreadsheet and slide files, the text recognition that reads scanned pages, and the models behind the photo and video tools. Using them tells nobody anything.
Docs keeps your documents, Video your film projects, Music your sessions and their recordings, Photo your edits and presets, and Ask your latest conversation, with the files you gave it (up to 100 MB each) and the files it made, in your browser’s own storage on your device, so they are there when you come back. They are never sent to us. In Ask, New empties the conversation. Settings you choose, such as whether the background moves or which model Ask uses, are kept there too. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes all of it.
The AI tools — background removal in Convert and Video; subject and face finding, denoising, depth and upscaling in Photo; Transcribe and Video’s captions; Ask — need an engine and a model the first time you use them. Both come from this site, like every other file here, and your browser keeps them afterwards. No other company is asked for anything, so there is nothing to agree to first.
Ask’s language model is the largest of them: 1.25 GB, or 242 to 265 MB for the smaller one used on phones and in browsers that lend a page no graphics card. It comes from this site only when you press the button that shows its size, and your browser keeps it in this site’s private file storage; Model, then Remove, deletes it. The model runs in your browser, so what you ask and what it answers never leave your device.
Each of those tools is open-source software written by somebody else. What they are, who wrote them and the licence each is used under is on the Licences page.
Without an account you get two free files a day; with a free account and a confirmed email address, ten. Each file you get out of a room counts as one, and a zip is one file however much is in it. A transcription counts once, when it finishes, and saving its words afterwards is free. Opening, editing, printing and copying never count, and neither do Photo’s saved settings or a still frame from Video. In Ask, a file it converts or a picture it changes counts when it is made, as in Convert and Photo; a document it writes or edits counts when you download it, as in Docs. To count them, the server keeps:
These rows are deleted after three days, by a clean-up that runs every day.
Before those rows are deleted, the server adds them up once a day into totals: how many different people finished a file that day, with or without an account, how many files each room made and in which formats, and how many were handed back; and, from the site’s other records, how many accounts were opened, confirmed and deleted, how many plans were started or ended, and how many accounts have the student plan through each school’s email domain, such as unifr.ch. A total is a day and a number, with nothing in it that points to anyone, so they are kept five years. A visit that finishes nothing is not counted. Only the person who runs the site sees them, on a page behind a sign-in, and in a summary by email every Monday. They began on 31 October 2026, with the privacy policy that announced them; nothing older was added up.
If you make an account, we store your email address and a PBKDF2-SHA256 hash of your password.
The password itself is never stored and cannot be read back from the hash. We also keep whether you have
confirmed the address, when you last signed in, and your sign-ins, which end after 60 days or when you
sign out.
We email you only about your account and your subscription: to confirm your address, to reset your password, about a subscription and its changes, before we delete an account nobody uses, to confirm it when you delete yours, when we give you a plan as a gift, and for the student plan: its link, and once a year a link to keep it. No newsletters, no marketing. The privacy policy lists every one.
You can delete your account yourself, from the account page: it goes at once, with its sign-ins and its counts. An account whose address was never confirmed is deleted after 30 days. A free account nobody has signed in to for two years is deleted too, after an email that gives you 30 days to sign in and keep it; an account that has ever had a subscription never is, nor one with a gifted plan or a student plan still running.
If you are given a plan as a gift, we keep when it started and when it ends, and a short note. An invitation to an address with no confirmed account yet keeps the address and a scrambled form of the link that was emailed, and is deleted 30 days after it runs out. Each gift, and what happens to it, is also written to a log of changes, kept two years. Deleting your account deletes the gift; the log keeps your address for its two years.
If you use the student plan, we keep the school address you used for it, and when it was last shown, for a year at a time. The part after the @ is checked against our list of the email domains of Swiss universities, universities of applied sciences and teacher colleges; nothing is asked of your school. The address is deleted when the plan ends, or with your account.
Card details go to Stripe and are handled entirely by Stripe. This site never receives or stores a card number. We keep the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, which plan you are on, and when it started and renews.
Before you pay, you tick two boxes: that you accept the terms, and that you want the subscription to start now. We keep a record of what you ticked and when. If you withdraw in the first 14 days, we keep a record of that too, and of the refund. Invoices and payment records like these are kept for 10 years, because Swiss law requires it; deleting your account removes your name and email from them.
No analytics tools, no advertising, no third-party tracking, no selling of anything to anyone. Totals per day, never a record of what any one person did over time. Two cookies: one to count free files, one to keep you signed in.
“Improvements or a bug” in the settings, and the optional question after you cancel or withdraw, send us what you write and any reasons you tick. An email address only if you give one, for a reply. A bug report also carries some technical details, and you see all of them before you send it: the room, your browser and system, your screen and window size, which version of the site you were on, and the last few script errors on the page. Never a file, its name, a picture or anything you typed into a document.
Each message is emailed to the person who runs the site and kept on our server for twelve months, in case the email goes astray, then deleted by the daily clean-up.
Universal Conversion is run from Switzerland, as a sole proprietorship under Swiss law; the legal notice says by whom. The Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection applies: the FADP (DSG in German, LPD in French), in its revised form in force since 1 September 2023. For visitors in the European Union and the EEA, the GDPR applies as well. The privacy policy is written for both.
Swiss law does not mean the data stays in Switzerland. Accounts, order records and the counts of finished files are in our database, which Cloudflare, an American company, runs for us in western Europe; the site’s emails go out through Cloudflare too. Payments are handled by Stripe, in Ireland, the USA and its other locations. Our mailbox is with Infomaniak, in Switzerland. Where data goes to the USA, section 6 of the privacy policy says how it is protected.
Under the FADP and the GDPR you can ask us for any of these, at any time and free of charge:
Write to contact@universalconversion.ch. We may ask you to confirm the request from the address on your account, so that nobody else can make it in your name, and we answer normally within 30 days. What the law makes us keep, such as payment records for 10 years, stays for that time; we tell you if that applies. The privacy policy lists your other rights.
If you think we have handled your data wrongly, tell us first. You can also complain to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, in Bern, or, in the EU or the EEA, to the data protection authority of the country where you live or work.
Bugs, questions, suggestions and anything else: contact@universalconversion.ch. A real person reads it. If there is a format or a tool you wish this site had, say so — that is how the list grows.
If something did not work, these things are what make it findable:
Roughly where it stopped helps too — part way through, or at the point of saving. Please do not send the file itself: we would rather not have it.
Privacy policy · Terms · Legal notice · Cancel or withdraw · Licences