Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Maaz-Sohail 112 days ago
Hi HN, I built pdffreeeditor.com, a free online PDF toolkit. It’s intentionally “boring”: do the job fast, don’t force accounts, and try not to feel sketchy. I recently did a pretty big SEO + structure cleanup (canonical/meta/schema duplication + internal linking), and now I want feedback from real humans on the part that actually matters long-term: UI/UX clarity, trust, and which features are genuinely missing.

Main pages I’d love feedback on (pick one and be ruthless):

Edit PDF: https://pdffreeeditor.com/edit-pdf/ Goal: “edit PDF online free” intent, quick edits/annotations, simple flow.

Compress PDF hub (cluster I’m trying to make a ‘star’): https://pdffreeeditor.com/compress-pdf/ Goal: fast compression with clear tradeoffs (quality vs size).

OCR PDF / extract text (hard category, needs trust): https://pdffreeeditor.com/ocr-pdf/ Goal: scanned PDFs → searchable/copyable text. (Accuracy depends on scan quality — trying to be honest about that.)

Sign PDF (quick form signing): https://pdffreeeditor.com/sign-pdf/ Goal: sign & download without an account.

A few “real life” use-case pages I’m testing (does this format help or annoy you?):

Compress for email.

Compress for WhatsApp.

Compress for portal upload.

Compress to 1MB.

Compress to 500KB.

Compress without losing quality (best-effort).

“Is my PDF scanned?” helper page.

What I’m specifically asking for:

Trust: At what moment do you hesitate? What feels shady or unclear?

UX: Where do you get stuck? What’s a “bounce point” in the flow?

Speed/feedback: Is progress/status clear enough during processing?

Compression expectations: Do the options make sense, or would you prefer simpler controls?

OCR expectations: What minimum output/UI would make you call it “useful”?

Missing feature: If you used PDF tools this month, what’s the #1 thing you needed that most tools mess up?

Constraints / honesty (not trying to oversell):

Scanned/image PDFs can’t be edited like normal text PDFs until OCR — I try to explain this clearly.

Compression has tradeoffs: image-heavy PDFs can’t shrink dramatically without visible loss.

I’m optimizing for “get in, do the job, get out” more than enterprise workflows.

If you try any single page and tell me what’s confusing, ugly, slow, or missing, I’ll treat it as a bug report and iterate quickly.

Homepage (if you want the overview): https://pdffreeeditor.com/