Why We Built SnapFetch

Every tool that does what SnapFetch does already exists somewhere. Convert a PDF to an image. Turn a photo into a PDF. Grab a Reel before it disappears from your feed. None of that is new.

The problem was never the conversion

What's missing is a version of these tools that doesn't make you feel like you need antivirus software just to visit the page. Popups stacked three deep. "Download" buttons that aren't the real download button. A redirect chain that ends somewhere you didn't ask to go.

That's the actual problem SnapFetch is trying to solve. Not "conversion" or "downloading" - trust. A tool that does exactly the one thing you asked it to do, and nothing else.

What "we don't keep your files" means here

That phrase appears on every converter site on the internet, so it's worth being specific about what it means on this one.

An uploaded file is written to temporary storage, converted, and permanently deleted by a cleanup job that runs every minute and removes anything older than an hour. That covers the file you uploaded and the file that came out. If a deletion fails, it's logged as an error rather than passing quietly.

Media downloads are stricter still. When you paste a link, the file is streamed from the source straight through to your browser and never written to our disks at all. Two operations are exceptions - trimming a clip to a range, and extracting MP3 audio - because both have to process the file server-side. Those follow the same one-hour deletion rule as an upload.

We run Google Analytics to count page views and see which tools people actually use, and that is the only third party on the site. It never receives your filenames, your file contents, or the links you paste into the downloader - it sees which page you were on, not what you did with it. There are no advertising cookies, no pixels and no session recorders. The privacy policy sets all of this out in full.

Telling you the limits before you upload

Conversion is lossy in ways that vary by format, and most sites won't say so until after you've waited for a broken file.

So every tool page carries a Specifications and limits section with the real numbers - file size caps, page caps, accepted formats - and a Troubleshooting section listing that conversion's actual failure modes. Those pages say plainly that PDF to Word has no OCR and can't read scans, that PDF to JPG can't preserve transparency, that HTML to PDF doesn't execute JavaScript.

Each page also links to the format's published specification and to the open-source software doing the work - Poppler, LibreOffice, WeasyPrint, FFmpeg. You should be able to check what's touching your file.

Why the downloader gets more caution

We started with document conversion, because it's the part we could build with zero legal ambiguity. The video downloader followed once we had a working answer to "how do we do this responsibly."

Every platform is off by default, and each one is enabled deliberately rather than shipped on. The ground under this kind of tool shifts fast - platforms change how their media is served, often without notice - and we would rather disable a downloader than serve broken results. When that happens the platform's page says plainly that it is temporarily unavailable, instead of leaving you to discover it by pasting a link into something that no longer works.

The short version

If you've ever bounced off one of the old-school converter sites because it felt sketchy, that's exactly the feeling we're building against.