I remember the exact moment it clicked. I was watching a friend fork over $14.99 for a monthly iLovePDF subscription just to merge a few PDF files and compress a handful of images. They used the service for maybe 5 minutes total and didn't touch it again for weeks.

That same month, I noticed a constant stream of the same burning questions across various online communities:

"Is there a free way to convert my PDFs to images?"

"How can I compress these photos without losing quality?"

"I need to split this massive PDF but I don't want to pay."

It hit me hard: companies were making serious money by putting a paywall around relatively simple file operations that have been technically possible for years. The standard industry pricing? $10-15 per month for tools that do exactly what I knew I could build myself.

So, I decided to do something about it. I built File Craft —a completely free, lightning-fast, and user-friendly file processing application that puts an end to expensive subscriptions.…