If you've used Sejda, Smallpdf, or iLovePDF, you already know what online file tools look like. They mostly work. They're mostly free until you hit the watermark or the daily limit. And they all share one design choice we wanted to challenge: your file leaves your computer.
For the average person merging two PDFs, that's fine. For everyone else — lawyers handling client matters, doctors annotating scans, founders sending term sheets, anyone working with proprietary documents — that's a constant low-grade source of anxiety. You don't really know what's happening to that file once it's uploaded. You don't know how long it sits there. You don't know whether it gets fed into a model. You just know the alternative is a 200 MB desktop install for a one-off task.
So we asked: what if we just didn't upload the file?
In-browser by default
Most of Axiomatic Tools runs in your browser. PDF merge, split, rotate, watermark, sign, fill forms, images-to-PDF, every image converter, JSON/YAML/XML formatting, regex, JWT decode, hashing, QR codes — all WebAssembly. Click the button and the work happens in a Web Worker on your own CPU. Your file is never sent over the wire.
For things that genuinely need a server (OCR, AI transcription, background removal, video encoding for files larger than a few hundred megabytes), we run that on infrastructure we operate end-to-end: open-source libraries, self-hosted Whisper for speech-to-text, our own GPU pool. No third-party processing APIs in the path.
A real API, priced like infrastructure
The other gap we kept hitting: building anything with one of these tools is painful. Most of them either don't expose a real API at all, or they bolt one on as an afterthought with a five-figure annual minimum. We wanted to be able to do this in code:
import { Axiomatic } from '@axiomatic/sdk';
const ax = new Axiomatic({ apiKey: process.env.AXIOMATIC_API_KEY! });
const job = await ax.run({ toolSlug: 'pdf-ocr', inputFileIds: [fileId] });
So that's a first-class product, not a hidden one. Pay-as-you-go starts at $0.005 per call. The same engine powers the public site.
What's next
We're at 42 tools today, focused on the most-searched workflows in PDF, image, video, audio, and developer-utility categories. The roadmap is more breadth (we'd like to be at 200+ within a year), Zapier and browser-extension surfaces, and a workflow builder that lets you chain tools together. If there's a tool you keep wishing existed, tell us.