About Smarkdown

A free, privacy-first tool that turns messy real-world documents into clean Markdown for AI workflows.

Why Smarkdown exists

If you have ever tried to paste a PDF into ChatGPT or feed a QuickBooks export to Claude, you know the problem. Real-world documents are messy. Excel exports come with company names in row 0, blank columns, and "Unnamed: 4" headers. PDFs lose their tables. Word documents arrive with stray formatting.

AI assistants work best when given clean, structured Markdown. Smarkdown converts 25+ document formats into exactly that, with no signup, no cost, and (for PDFs) no file ever leaving your browser.

What it does

  • 25+ formats supported: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, HTML, CSV, JSON, image OCR, audio transcription, and more.
  • Smart Clean Mode for spreadsheets: detects real headers when business software puts the company name in row 0; strips empty columns; preserves accounting acronyms (YTD, AP, AR) in title case.
  • Privacy-first PDFs: PDFs are processed entirely in your browser. Other formats use a stateless server that deletes files immediately after conversion.
  • Free for everyone: 256MB max file size, all clean modes, batch up to 50 files. No tier system, no signup wall.

The tech behind it

Honest credit where it is due. The conversion engine is built on top of Microsoft's MarkItDown library, with a custom pipeline for spreadsheet cleanup, OCR for scanned PDFs (Tesseract), and Ghostscript-powered compression.

The site is built with Astro (static, fast). The API is FastAPI in a Docker container on Hetzner. Source is on GitHub.

Who built it

G

Gareth Ellis

Founder, Smarkdown

Technical founder. I build tools that make AI workflows actually work for normal people: accountants, researchers, content folks. Operating from Otley, UK under Mycelium Consulting Limited.

GitHub · Contact

How it stays free

The static site is on Netlify (free tier). The API runs on a small Hetzner box. Plausible Analytics (self-hosted, no cookies) costs near zero. There is no investor pressure, no growth-at-all-costs roadmap. Smarkdown stays free because it is cheap to run and useful.

If it saves you time and you want to support it, the most useful thing you can do is share it with someone who would benefit, or tell us what you wish it did better.

Try Smarkdown Free