What it is
Deskbench is a set of 89 free browser-based tools for everyday document work — merging PDFs, resizing images, converting spreadsheets, comparing drafts. Every tool runs entirely inside the visitor's browser: files are never uploaded, and there is no server that could receive them. Built and operated by Fungible Capital Pty Ltd at deskbench.app.
The problem it solves
Free document tools work by taking an upload, processing it on a server and returning a result. The upload is not a technical requirement — it is the business model, and it means a contract, a bank statement or a passport scan sits on someone else's machine under a retention policy nobody reads. The alternative people increasingly reach for instead is pasting the document into an AI assistant, which has the same property.
Deskbench does the work on the visitor's own device, so the question of retention does not arise.
How it works
- Files are read into memory by JavaScript in the browser and processed there
- Libraries compiled to WebAssembly do the heavy work —
pdf-libandpdf.jsfor PDFs,SheetJSandPapaParsefor spreadsheets,Tesseract.js(Apache-2.0) for OCR - Results are assembled in memory and handed back as a download
- No upload endpoint exists, which is verifiable: load a tool, disconnect from the network, and it still works
- Every tool page carries a live network monitor reporting what left the device during the operation, next to the size of the file
What we built
- A static-site generator producing 109 pages from a single tool catalogue
- Five multi-tool workspaces (PDF, image, text, data, video) where operations chain on one file in memory
- Optical character recognition running locally — a real recognition model downloaded once to the device, rather than the document being uploaded to where the model lives
- Installable and fully offline-capable via a service worker
- A test suite of 241 assertions plus a validator gating every deploy
Where it runs
A static site with no server-side runtime, deployed on Vercel. Free, with no account, no usage limit and no watermark — serving static pages costs almost nothing, which is what makes that sustainable.