Who makes Folia, and what it will never do.
Who is behind this
Folia is built and run by Morn Tithsinara, an independent software developer working from Cambodia. There is no venture funding behind it, no growth team and no data partner — which is worth saying plainly, because a document tool that answers to investors eventually has to find something to do with your documents.
It also means support is answered by the person who wrote the code. Write to either address on the contact page and the reply comes from someone who can actually fix the thing you found.
Why every tool runs on your own machine
Most online PDF services work by receiving your file, processing it on their servers and sending the result back. For a shopping list that is fine. For a contract under negotiation, a medical letter or a tax return, it means the document sits on a computer you do not control, under a retention policy you did not read.
Folia inverts that. The desktop version never opens a network connection to do its work, and the free web tools at tools.foliadocs.com download the program into your browser and run it there — your file is read from your own disk into your own memory and handed back as a download. It never crosses the internet.
You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser’s network inspector, run any tool on the online version, and watch that no request carrying your file is ever made. A claim you can check in thirty seconds is worth more than a badge.
One engine, two front ends
The desktop version and the online version are not two products that resemble each other. They are one PDF engine with two front ends: the same merging, conversion, OCR, redaction and signing code, mounted either in a desktop window or in a browser tab.
That is why the online version can be genuinely free. It was written to run entirely on one person’s machine, so putting it on the web meant removing a wrapper rather than building a service. There is no per-document server cost to recover, which is why the online version has no daily cap, no watermark and no sign-up.
The one exception, and it announces itself
The two AI tools are the single exception to on-device processing, and they say so before you start. A language model that size cannot run in a browser, so those two send the document’s text — never the file, never its images — to our own servers, and delete it when the job finishes. The privacy policy sets out exactly what that involves.
Everything else on the online version, and all of the desktop version, runs where you are. That is not a setting you have to find; it is how the software is built, which is why the exception needs announcing at all.
What we will not do
No account required to use the free online tools. No file retention, because there is no upload to retain. No selling, sharing or brokering of anything about a visitor’s documents, under any commercial arrangement. And no quiet change to any of that — it would be written on this page and in the policy first.
If Folia ever broke one of those, it would stop being the thing it was built to be, and the reason to choose it would go with it. That is a stronger guarantee than a promise, because it is the whole product.