Support
Support PDFSearch
PDFSearch is free, has no accounts, and never uploads your files. It is built and paid for by one developer. If it saved you time, here are the ways you can help.
Why this page exists
Hosting, domains, and maintenance cost money, and the time to build features costs rather more. There is no company behind this and no investors — so the honest options are a small number of people choosing to chip in, or advertising, or the project quietly stalling.
The core search will stay free regardless. No metering, no truncated results, no trial that runs out. That is the whole point of the tool, and putting it behind a paywall would defeat it.
Ways to help that cost nothing
- Tell someone. A colleague drowning in a folder of PDFs is the ideal audience, and word of mouth is how nearly everyone finds this.
- Send feedback. The feedback button on any page. Knowing what broke, or what is missing, is worth more than it sounds.
- Vote on the roadmap. It decides what gets built next.
- Link to it from a blog post, a course page, or an answer where it genuinely helps.
Supporting financially
A page for financial support is being set up and will appear here shortly. In the meantime, sharing the tool and sending feedback genuinely helps more than you would expect.
What supporters get
Nothing is taken away from people who do not support the project — no feature is locked and no limit is tightened. Supporting simply keeps the work going, and shapes it: if you support the project and ask for something, you will find me considerably more motivated to build it.
On advertising
If ads are running, it is one placement in the right margin on wide screens— never inside your search results, never on mobile, and never anything that interrupts you. The space it occupies is reserved whether or not an ad loads, so the page does not jump around.
You can switch it off below, and switching it off means the ad script is never downloaded — not merely hidden. It is an honour-system setting: there is no check that you support the project, because building one would cost more than it is worth.
What is collected either way is described in the privacy policy.
Using PDFSearch at work
If your team relies on this — or would, with one change — that is worth a conversation. Self-hosted deployments and organisation-specific workflows are the most likely way this becomes sustainable long-term. Get in touch through the contact page.