Three free files a month: spend them where they count

Who the allowance suits

Take a landlord who fixes one lease a month: a tenant name to correct, a clause to reword, one export to send. Three files cover that rhythm with room to spare, and the no-signup start means the job begins immediately. For genuinely occasional editing, a small stated allowance beats a large vague one.

Now take a student mid-thesis with forty drafts to shrink, merge and reorder before Friday. The fourth file ends the free month in the first hour. That workload belongs in the compressor and the page tool, where the fortieth run costs exactly as much as the first: nothing, with no account and no meter. Ask how many files your month holds before you pick a side.

DocFly and PDFGym compared

DocFly's front page at docfly.com states the three-a-month figures quoted above. Checked 10 September 2026. A paid plan lifts the caps for people who run past them regularly. Against that, the side by side:

Where DocFly wins

In-place editing and formatted conversion, the two things PDFGym has no tool for. Correcting the tenant name in place, turning a PDF table into a formatted editable document: DocFly does both inside its three-file allowance, and PDFGym does neither at any price. For a month with one correction and one conversion, the free tier is exactly enough, and paying for more would be waste.

Credit is also due for stating the number. Most suites in this market hide their free caps behind vague wording; DocFly prints three a month on the front page so you can plan around it. A small allowance you know about beats a larger one you discover mid-task. The edits run online, so weigh that against the file: fine for an ordinary form, worth a pause for anything confidential.

Where PDFGym fits

Everywhere the allowance would burn for no reason. Rotation and cropping, splitting and deletion, page order fixes, images in and pages out, passwords, stamps, redaction, metadata checks and repair: no tool here keeps a count, because every run happens on your own machine, which costs the site nothing to serve.

Each output is also read back and compared with its input before download, which is the receipt for the thesis student's Friday deadline. A tool that cannot prove its own result does not ship here, and that check is why the toolset stays focused on files rather than contents.

A plan for both

Spend DocFly's three files only on jobs no tab can do: an in-place edit, a formatted conversion. Do the sizing, merging, splitting and cleanup in the browser, where no counter runs and no upload happens, and the allowance lasts the month instead of the morning.

For neighboring questions, the pdfFiller comparison covers form workflows, and the free editor roundup orders the tools that genuinely edit text in place, which PDFGym does not.

How we checked

We read DocFly's front page for the allowance figures quoted above, checked 10 September 2026, and matched the PDFGym side against the tool pages and code in this repository. We created no accounts, uploaded no documents and ran no timed tests, so plan details beyond the stated free figures stay generic here.