Augustus Skipworth & SkipWire Laboratories proudly present
The big PDF companies would like to rent you a pencil: by the month, with a login, with your papers sent off to their cloud. SpitePDF is a fast, stubbornly offline PDF editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad. You buy it once, like a pencil, and it's yours.
Nobody rents a pencil.
Why rent your PDF editor?
No subscription. No account. No cloud. No follow-up emails. Free to try for fourteen days before a single silver dollar changes hands.
“In the office of the future, ladies and gentlemen, a man will buy a pencil, and the pencil will simply… write. It will not ask for his email. It will not stop on the first of the month. It will not send him a survey on Tuesday.” The Narrator
Thank you, Narrator, that'll do. Folks, Gus Skipworth. Last Saturday, at the county fair, a boy at an ice cream booth tried to rent me a pencil on behalf of a Very Large Document Company. I went home and built SpitePDF by Monday. You'll want to hear about it. It's just below, and it's shorter than their terms of service.
Augustus Skipworth, interruptingSaturday afternoon · The county fairgrounds · An ice cream booth
The Founder hands a boy two silver dollars for a butter pecan cone. Before the first lick, the boy wants his mother's maiden name, an email for the “Scoop-Plus” loyalty tier, and $1.99 a month to unlock the bottom of the cone.
The Founder asks to borrow a pencil, to write down the name of the boy's manager.
The boy“Pencils are provided by our partner, a Very Large Document Company. Pencil access is $19.99 a month, billed annually. You'll need to sign in to the pencil. The eraser is Premium.”
The Founder“I have my ice cream cone, young man.”
Read the Founder's full account in the archives ↓The Narrator Accounts of the incident vary. The boy remembers a man who paid with a 1964 half-dollar and left without his change. SpitePDF also took somewhat longer than a weekend. The pencil has declined to comment.
So, for the record, here is how a pencil is made, according to the Founder, and how many subscriptions it takes.
Cedar, from a hill nobody was using.
With a shovel he already owned.
Glues it, paints it yellow, sharpens it.
He sells it to you and goes home.
Lapsed subscribers may continue to hold the pencil.
“Imagine I came to your house every month to ask whether you'd like to keep using the pencil. Imagine the pencil stopped writing on the first of the month until you'd paid me. You'd call the sheriff, and you'd be right to. A PDF editor is a pencil for paper that happens to live on a screen. I made it, I sold it to you, I went home.” Augustus Skipworth, on pencils
SpitePDF is the pencil. Buy it once. Write with it forever.
Most products come with a list of features. This one comes with a list of things it declines to do, which the Founder considers the more important list.
You pay once. The app is yours. No renewal date, no “your plan is expiring”, no cone-tip lease.
Pay once. Done.No sign-up, no password, no mother's maiden name. Apple confirms your purchase on your own device and that's the end of the paperwork.
We don't want your email.Your documents stay on your own machine, or wherever you choose to keep them. Text recognition runs on your device. There are no servers of ours for your files to go to.
Your desk, your papers.No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no “how are we doing?” Once you have the app, you'll never hear from us unless you knock on our door.
We are no longer acquaintances.| The lad at the booth | Gus Skipworth | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | “That's $1.99 a month for the bottom of the cone.” | One price. Once. The whole cone. |
| Borrowing a pencil | “$19.99 a month, billed annually. Sign in to the pencil.” | Here. It's yours. Keep it. |
| Sign-up | Mother's maiden name, home address, email. | Nothing. Open the app. |
| Your files | “Our cloud assistant would love to read your tax return.” | Stay on your machine. |
| Afterward | Loyalty tier, newsletters, a survey, a second survey. | Silence. Blessed silence. |
| Location check | “Download our app to verify you're still in the county.” | Works offline, wherever you are. |
Other PDF apps lock redaction, OCR and scale measurement behind $240-a-year subscriptions. SpitePDF puts the full everyday toolkit in Core, $49.99 once, made for the contracts, drawing sets, tax forms and reports you work on all day.
An iPhone app, not a shrunken desktop. One dock with three controls; the screen edges do the rest.
“A pencil fits in one hand. So should this.” · Gus
Turn on Fuzzy and SpitePDF forgives typos, hyphenated line breaks and scanned OCR errors, on Mac, iPhone and iPad.
“It reads your papers at your desk, not in somebody's data center.” · Gus
Tabs, split view and a command palette, plus conversion, scan clean-up and automation, all on your Mac with nothing uploaded.
Retype a line on the page, add text anywhere, and put documents together without leaving the app.
“Every good pencil comes with an eraser. No extra charge.” · Gus
SpitePDF takes the text, vector lines and image pixels out of the file itself, not just out of sight.
“What's under the box is nobody's business. Least of all ours.” · Gus
Calibrate a sheet, then measure lengths, perimeters and areas right on the drawing, with Apple Pencil on iPad.
Bid or close out jobs for a living? See what Pro adds (Takeoff, Review).
Fill and calculate forms, sign with a certificate, and lock the file down before it goes out.
Filing with a court or sending files to press? See what Pro adds (Counsel, Press).
“No account required to sign your own name. Imagine.” · Gus
Core is the pencil. Pro is the whole drafting kit. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars a year for separate trade tools, Pro bundles all five specialist workbenches below, plus everything in Core, into one purchase: $149.99 once, intro price through January 1, 2027 (regular $199.99). The workbenches are included in Pro, not sold separately.
Measure, count and price a set of plans, right on the sheet.
Mac · essentials on iPhone and iPadAlready in Core: scale calibration, length, perimeter and area measuring, CSV or XML totals on the Mac, clouds and callouts.
Run submittal review and closeout, from stamps to the binder.
Mac · essentials on iPhone and iPadAlready in Core: page organizer, comment list with filters and replies, review statuses and your own stamps.
Produce, redact and file court documents with confidence.
Mac · essentials on iPhone and iPadAlready in Core: true redaction, the one-pass personal-data finder, Sanitize, plain Bates numbering and certificate signing.
Outputs carry no visible SpitePDF branding.
Fix PDFs for accessibility remediation work.
Mac · checker on iPhone and iPadAlready in Core: auto-tagging, document language, a basic accessibility check, typed alt text and the bookmark editor.
Does not guarantee compliance. Where a check cannot be evaluated it says “needs manual check”; confirm with an independent PDF/UA checker.
For specialty printing, not office printing.
Get files press-ready for a commercial printer, print shop or book publisher: preflight, fix and impose. You don't need it to print on your own printer.
Mac · PDF/X conversion on iPhone and iPadAlready in Core: PDF/X and PDF/A preflight, Output Preview, crop and margin controls, and N-up and poster layouts.
Structural checks, not a certified validator. Check your printer's current spec before you send files.
SpitePDF Pro includes Takeoff, Review, Counsel, Access and Press, plus everything in Core: $149.99 once.
Own Core already? The Pro Upgrade adds all five for $99.99.
Access and Press run mainly on the Mac; the accessibility checker and Convert to PDF/X also run on iPhone and iPad. Buying for a team? Each person buys on the App Store; Apple's emailed receipt is the invoice.
“Most people only need the pencil. If you draw for a living, take the whole kit.” · Gus
See the LedgerTry everything free for fourteen days: every tool, no watermarks. Then pay once, in the app, through Apple. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac.
US prices. Local prices are set by the App Store and the app always shows the live price before you pay. Apple's emailed receipt is the only email this transaction will ever produce, and frankly, that one is Apple's doing.
And in year four the subscription bill keeps coming, while SpitePDF keeps quiet.
Really. We don't collect your address, so there's nothing to send to. Apple sends its own purchase receipt. That's between you and Apple. We are not cc'd.
No. There is no SpitePDF account. Your purchase is tied to your Apple Account, which you already have. To move to a new device, open SpitePDF and tap Restore Purchases in Settings.
Yes. The PDF engine does its work on your device. The network is used only when you ask for something that needs it, such as a signature timestamp, a certificate check, submitting a form, or turning a web page into a PDF.
You can keep reading PDFs. The editing tools wait politely. Nobody chases you. Nobody asks how the cone performed.
iPhone (iOS 18 or later), iPad (iPadOS 18 or later) and Mac (macOS 14 or later). One purchase covers all three.
Probably not. Core is the complete PDF editor, redaction, OCR, certificate signing and scale measuring included. Pro is for people who do takeoffs, submittal review, court productions, accessibility remediation or commercial print work for a living. See the five workbenches.
The introductory prices hold through January 1, 2027. After that Core is $79.99, Pro is $199.99 and the Pro Upgrade is $119.99. Whatever you paid, you never pay it again.
He says so. The Narrator has asked us to point out that the pencil is roughly four hundred years older than Mr. Skipworth. Mr. Skipworth has asked us to point out that the Narrator wasn't there.
He would prefer you didn't ask. SpitePDF is real, though, and it really doesn't want your email.
None of this is required to use SpitePDF. Mr. Skipworth insisted it be kept anyway.
I went down to the county fairgrounds on Saturday afternoon with one simple, honorable objective: I wanted a scoop of butter pecan in a waffle cone.
I walked up to the booth. I handed the lad behind the counter two silver dollars. He scooped the cream, set it into the cone, and placed it squarely into my hand.
In any civilized society, that is the end of the story. Money changes hands, goods are delivered, two men tip their hats, and we go our separate ways until death or another craving for butter pecan brings us back together.
Instead, the boy leans over the counter like we're about to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles.
“Now, sir,” he says, “before you take a lick, I just need your mother's maiden name, your home address, and an email so we can enroll you in our ‘Scoop-Plus’ loyalty tier. Also, the cone itself is leased, so if you'd like to unlock the bottom tip where the melted ice cream collects, that's $1.99 a month, and you'll need to download our mobile app to verify you're still in the county.”
Now, I am a reasonable man. I asked to borrow a pencil, so I could write down the name of his manager.
He pointed at a banner hanging over the booth. “Pencils are provided by our partner, a Very Large Document Company,” he says. “Pencil access is $19.99 a month, billed annually. You'll need an account to sign in to the pencil. The eraser is in the Premium tier. And they'd like to keep a copy of whatever you write, in their cloud, to help improve the pencil.”
I stood there in the dirt, butter pecan starting to drip down my knuckles, staring at this kid. I didn't get angry. I didn't raise my voice. I just looked him dead in the eye and said:
“I have my ice cream cone, young man.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I have my ice cream cone, young man. You have my two dollars. Our business is concluded. We are no longer acquaintances. Do not write to me. Do not follow me home. Do not ask me how the cone performed on a scale of one to ten. And you may tell your partner that I have used the same pencil since 1952. I made it myself, I charged myself a nickel for it, and I paid in full. It has never once asked me for my email.”
And then I turned around and walked away.
Somewhere along the line, the modern world forgot how to finish a transaction. The man who makes a pencil chops the tree, mines the graphite, makes the pencil and sells it to you, and that is the end of his involvement. But the big document companies want to rent you the pencil. They want an account. They want a monthly tribute. They want to know what you're writing, where you're keeping it, and whether you'd like their “cloud assistant” to read your private tax returns.
At SkipWire Laboratories, we practice the lost art of minding our own business. That is why I went home and built SpitePDF: a pencil for paper that happens to live on a screen. It took me the weekend. Give or take.
You hand me your money. I hand you the pencil. You have your ice cream cone. Now go enjoy it in peace.
Gus Skipworth is the proprietor of SkipWire Laboratories, a Division of Tomorrow, which also gave the world SkipWire: your own computer, delivered by wire to any screen in the house. He has a habit of inventing things that do their job and then get out of the way, and a habit of inventing things that were already invented.
The Narrator The six icons are identical except for the pencil. Mr. Skipworth maintains that this is the whole point, and that you will know which one to pick.
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Absolutely not. I don't want to write to you and you don't want to read it.
Augustus Skipworth