Privacy
PDF Studio is published by ElixTechs, which also runs this website and the licence server.
Your documents
Your documents are never uploaded, by any tool. All processing happens on your own machine, and the software has no cloud service to send anything to.
What the software sends
One thing is required: the licence check. When it is activated and periodically afterwards, the software contacts the licence server and sends the licence key, a hashed machine identifier, the computer name, and the version of the application and of Windows. Our server is configured not to store the computer name for online activations; for offline activation, the computer name in the request code is kept.
The machine identifier is not a hardware serial number. The software hashes local identifiers together with your licence serial, producing a value that tells us nothing about the machine, and that differs for the same machine under a different licence.
If your policy forbids any connection, there is a manual activation route that requires no network access from the machine at all.
Optional downloads — the OCR, Office-conversion and AI add-ons and model packs — contact their publishers’ sites (such as github.com and huggingface.co) or this website only when a user chooses to install them, and send nothing about documents.
Since version 1.2 the software asks this website once a day whether a newer version exists, sending only its version, the processor type and the build number of its document engine; this can be turned off in its settings. We do not link that request to a licence or a machine.
And if the software runs into a problem, it asks the user once whether to send error reports, and sends nothing without that agreement. A report describes the error and where in the software it happened, with the app and Windows versions and a random installation ID; file names, paths, the user and computer names, e-mail addresses and licence keys are removed before it is sent. We keep reports in our technical logs only to fix faults, and they are deleted automatically.
IT departments can turn off both the update check and error reports for every user of a PC with a Windows registry policy; details are in Network and firewall.
Files the software produces carry a short record of the operations applied to them, including the source file names. It can be removed with Edit Metadata. Full details are in Security and data protection.
This website
We use no tracking cookies and no third-party analytics. The fonts and stylesheets are served from this site, so no third party learns that you visited.
We count downloads. When you download a file we store a hash of your address, combined with a secret salt and today's date — the value changes every day, so it is enough to know how many people downloaded something today and not enough to follow anyone from one day to the next. The address itself is not stored.
The request form
What you type into the quote request form reaches us and is used to answer you and, if you go ahead, to issue your licence. We do not share it with anyone and we do not send marketing. Email us if you want your details deleted.
Licence server records
The licence server keeps a record of activations, including the connecting address, so that abuse can be detected. Those records are deleted automatically after a set period, and addresses are cleared from dormant machine records sooner.