I spent 3 months building a free tool and nobody cares. what am i doing wrong?

I'm feeling really depressed today and just need some honest truth from you guys.

for the last 3 months i gave everything to build a project called LocalPDF. its a pdf processing tool (merge, split, redact, compress etc). but the catch is it runs 100% offline in the browser. no servers, no uploading your private docs, no ads, no login, no file limits.

whatever features people asked for, i built it for them. i thought people hated uploading their personal files to those sketchy ad filled websites. but right now I'm getting maybe 20 views a day.

to make it worse my payment provider just banned my account because offline pdf tools are "too risky" for their bots to verify. so the only 2 people who actually donated to support me just got refunded today. I literally have nothing to show for 3 months of work.

I'm just tired. do people actually even need a tool like this? did i waste my time?

i want to know what am i doing wrong to reach people. why am i lacking behind so much when the tool is completely free and private? please be brutal. if people just prefer to use adobe or ilovepdf and dont care about privacy, just tell me so i can stop working on this and move on.

if you want to see if it even works the link is https://local-pdf.pages.dev

please tell me what i should improve or if the whole idea is just a failure.

Posted Apr 5, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

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