Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 31, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Toolsfully ("we", "us", "our") handles information when you use our website at toolsfully.com (the "Site"). We've designed Toolsfully to collect as little as possible.

Your files are never uploaded

Toolsfully's tools run entirely within your web browser. Any file you open in a tool — a PDF, an image, or other document — is processed locally on your own device and is never uploaded to, transmitted to, or stored on our servers. We do not see, receive, retain, or have any access to the contents of the files you work with.

There is exactly one exception on the whole Site, it involves no files, and it never happens without you pressing a button: the microwave path profile can look up ground elevations from a third party. It is described in full below.

Information we collect

We do not ask you to create an account to use the free tools, and we do not collect names or file contents. Like most websites, our hosting provider and analytics may automatically receive standard technical information such as your browser type, device type, approximate location (derived from your IP address), and the pages you visit. This is used to keep the Site secure and to understand overall usage.

Location, in the solar tools

The solar calculators can work out how much sunlight to expect at a particular site. You can give that site three ways: let your browser supply your position, pick a town from a list, or type coordinates. Whichever you choose, the location stays on your device.

This is worth spelling out, because the ordinary way to build this feature would not be private at all. Most sites turn an address into coordinates by sending it to a geocoding service, and most fetch sunlight figures by sending your coordinates to a weather or solar API. Either request hands a third party a good approximation of where you live. We do neither. The place list and the irradiance data are ordinary files served from this site, downloaded to your browser, and searched there — so the lookup is arithmetic on your own machine rather than a question asked of a server.

• Nothing is sent. No address, no coordinates, no place name, and no result leaves your browser — not to us, not to an analytics event, not to an advertiser, and not in a link or query string.
• One exception, and it is not ours. If you press "Use my current location", your browser may contact its own vendor's location service to work out where you are. That exchange is between you and your browser, and we can neither see it nor prevent it. Typing a place or coordinates avoids it entirely.
• Stored only if it helps you. The chosen site is kept in your browser's local storage so the solar tools remember it between visits. It never reaches us. Every solar tool has a "Forget this location" button, and clearing your browser's site data removes it too.

Where the data comes from

Two public datasets are bundled with the Site so the lookups above can happen offline:

• Sunlight figures are the NASA POWER SYN1DEG climatology — a twenty-year monthly average of global horizontal irradiance on a one-degree grid. These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science Directorate Applied Science Program.
• Town and city locations come from GeoNames, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

Both are climate and geography references, not predictions about your particular roof. A grid cell is about 110 km across and a twenty-year average smooths over years that ran well above or below it, so treat the figures as a well-founded starting point rather than a survey of your site.

VIN lookup, in the Car Maintenance Tracker

The Car Maintenance Tracker keeps your vehicles, records, receipts and photos in your browser's own storage on your device; none of it is sent to us. It checks a VIN on your device. If — and only if — you press Look up online, it sends that VIN, and nothing else, to the free vehicle decoder run by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov), without cookies or a referrer, and shows you the make, model and engine it returns. NHTSA's own privacy practices apply to that request.

Scanning a receipt reads the photo on your device. The text recognition engine is downloaded from this Site the first time you scan and kept by your browser; the photo is not uploaded.

Supporting Toolsfully (payments by Stripe)

If you choose to support Toolsfully, you are taken to a checkout page run by Stripe. Our pages load no Stripe script; your card details go to Stripe and never to us. Stripe shares with us, as the account holder, the details any shop would see — your name, email address, billing country, the amount and the date — and we use them only to keep records, send or answer questions about receipts, and manage a recurring contribution if you have one. We do not sell them or use them for advertising, and nothing about a payment is connected to how you use the tools, which never send us anything. Stripe's privacy policy covers what Stripe itself collects. To ask about or delete your payment details held by us, contact us.

Terrain elevations, in the microwave path profile

One tool on this Site can send something. It is the Microwave Path Profile, and this section explains exactly what, when, and how to avoid it.

A path profile needs to know the shape of the ground between two points. There is no way to know that without either holding a global elevation model — terabytes, at the resolution this work needs — or asking somebody who does. So that tool offers three ways to supply the ground, and only the third one leaves your device:

• Type the obstacles. Distances and heights you enter yourself. Nothing is sent.
• Paste a profile. Survey data, a mapping export, or terrain you fetched on a previous visit. Nothing is sent.
• Fetch the terrain. This sends coordinates to a third party. It is described below.

• Nothing is sent until you press the button. Choosing the fetch option, typing coordinates, and reading the summary all happen on your device. There is no automatic lookup, no lookup as you type, and no remembered consent — every fetch is a separate decision.
• You are shown the payload first. Before anything is sent, the tool displays who would receive it, how many coordinate pairs, and the geographic area those coordinates would reveal.
• Coordinates only. The request contains latitude and longitude and nothing else. No site names, frequencies, antenna heights, project data, account, or key. It is sent as a POST so that coordinates never appear in a URL, a browser history entry, or a referrer header, and it carries no cookies.
• Who receives it. Open-Elevation, a free public elevation service that we do not run and are not affiliated with. What they log is theirs, not ours, and their handling of it is governed by their terms rather than this policy. Like any web request, it necessarily reveals your IP address to them.
• We never receive it. The request goes from your browser to them directly. It does not pass through us, and we do not see the coordinates, the result, or the fact that you made one.
• Nothing is stored. Fetched elevations live in the page for as long as the tab is open. The tool also hands them to you as text so you can keep them yourself and paste them back later, which makes every subsequent calculation entirely local.

If you would rather nothing left your device at all, use the first two options. They are not a degraded fallback — they do the same arithmetic and produce the same answers.

Cookies and advertising

We use advertising to keep Toolsfully free. Advertising may be provided by Google, including through Google AdSense.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this Site and/or other sites on the internet.
• You may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. You can also opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info/choices.

If you use an ad-free Toolsfully Plus membership, advertising cookies from these ad partners are not served to you on the Site.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the Site is used. Google Analytics sets cookies and receives standard information about your visit: the pages you view, the site or search that sent you here, your browser and device type, and your IP address, which is used to derive an approximate location (Google states that Analytics 4 does not log or retain IP addresses). This tells us which tools people actually use, so we know what to build and fix next.

On some tool pages we also record anonymous action counts — for example, that a transcription was started, or that a file was exported. These record only that an action happened, never what it was done to.

What analytics never receives. Analytics is a separate thing from the tools themselves. It never receives the files you open, the text you type or paste, the passwords or passphrases you generate or enter, or any result a tool produces. Those are processed in your browser's memory and are never transmitted anywhere — see "Your files are never uploaded" above. Analytics can tell us that someone used the PDF merger; it cannot tell us anything about the PDF.

You can opt out of Google Analytics on every website by installing Google's opt-out browser add-on, or by blocking analytics cookies and scripts in your browser or with a content blocker. Blocking analytics does not affect the tools — they run locally and keep working normally.

Children's privacy

Toolsfully is a general-audience site and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Your choices

You can control cookies through your browser settings, including blocking or deleting them. Because the tools run locally, blocking cookies does not stop the tools from working.

Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we'll revise the "Last updated" date above.

Contact

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please reach us through our contact page.