The free tier covers individual users completely. Pro is for litigators, journalists, archivists, and compliance teams who need higher volumes, deeper features, and the option of presenting a clean unbranded artifact. If you do this twice a year, the free tier is everything you need.
Everything an individual user needs. Forever, with no clock.
.eml and .msg filesBATES prefixor $40/year · or $99 once, lifetime
Higher batch limits and the features regulated workflows need.
BATES, EVID, EX_), per-file overrides.eml filesPayments not yet wired — drop us a note and we'll add you to the early-access list.
Hosting a static site is nearly free. Our costs are domain registration, ongoing development, and the time it takes to support professional users. Pro subscribers fund the project. Most people will never need Pro — and that's fine.
We aren't venture-funded. There is no growth-at-all-costs runway demanding aggressive monetization. The free tier is a complete tool because that's what the project is for: making forensic-grade email archival available to anyone who needs it. Pro exists so the people who depend on this tool professionally can fund the people who maintain it.
If you are a working journalist, public-interest lawyer, or non-profit archivist and the price is friction, write to us. We grant free Pro access in cases like yours; the only ask is a brief note explaining the use.
Yes. All Pro features run in your browser. OCR uses Tesseract.js (which loads its WebAssembly engine and language data once, then runs entirely on your machine). Redaction is implemented by parsing and rewriting the PDF stream locally — the redacted text is removed from the document, not just covered with a black rectangle. There is no server-side processing of any kind.
Your existing PDFs are yours forever — they don't depend on us in any way. The Pro features simply stop being unlocked in the converter. If you have a lifetime license, no renewal is ever required.
A signed license token (Ed25519, verified locally) unlocks Pro features. The license-issuing endpoint is the one network call that does happen — once, at activation. After that, your token is verified offline. We document the protocol on the privacy page for the curious.
No. The free-tier feature list above is the floor, not a ceiling. We may add features over time, and most of them will land in both tiers. Specifically: forensic-grade output stays free. We will not move existing free-tier features behind a paywall.
Not yet, but we will. If you have a specific use case (a litigation department, a newsroom, a compliance team), email hello@mailtopdf.com and we'll work it out — early customers get to set the precedent.
If it covers what you need, that's the right answer.