Why I built Convertyard

Most file converter sites are broken by design.

Not technically broken — they work fine. But they're built around a model that requires you to pay, sign up, or hand over your files to a server you know nothing about. That's not a bug. That's the business model.

I ran into this firsthand trying to convert 12 JPGs to WebP. Simple task. Should take 30 seconds. Instead I hit a wall: one site cut me off at 10 files unless I upgraded. Another wanted me to create an account just to download. A third converted everything fine — but I noticed the files were being uploaded to their servers first. For JPGs of my own work, that felt wrong.

That's when I realized the problem isn't just paywalls. It's that converting files privately, in bulk, without friction doesn't really exist as a free option. Every tool either monetizes your files or monetizes your attention.

So I built ConvertYard

The core idea: every conversion runs entirely in your browser. No file ever touches a server. Not mine, not anyone else's. This is possible because of WebAssembly — the same technology that lets you run Photoshop in a browser tab. I use libraries like ffmpeg.wasm, libvips, and mupdf-wasm to handle images, video, audio, and PDFs locally on your device.

The other thing I wanted to fix was batch handling. Most converters treat batch as a premium feature. On ConvertYard it's the default. Drop 1 file or 1,000 — the tool handles it the same way, shows you per-file progress, and zips the output when it's done.

I've now shipped 109 tools across images, video, audio, and PDFs. JPG to WebP, PDF to Word, MP4 to MP3, HEIC to JPG — the full long tail of "I just need to convert this one thing" tasks.

Where I'm at honestly:

- 109 tools live

- Traffic is mostly me, friends, and family testing things

- Zero revenue

- Just starting to submit to directories this week, with outreach planned after

No hockey stick yet. I'm at the "does this even work for strangers" stage.

Where I want to go:

100,000 visitors a month. Not because that's a round number, but because at that scale ConvertYard becomes genuinely useful as a resource — the place you go when you need to convert something and don't want to deal with paywalls or upload your files to a stranger's server.

The SEO angle is real: there are thousands of searches every day for "[format] to [format] converter" and most of the top results are the exact sites I was frustrated with. I think there's a real opening for a tool that wins on trust and privacy rather than on dark patterns.

I'd love to know:

Have you hit the same paywall frustration with file converters? And if you've tried ConvertYard, I genuinely want to hear what's broken or missing — it's early and feedback matters more than polish right now.

Site: convertyard.com