XConvert is free to use, with no account and no watermark, and we would like to keep it that way. That is harder for a conversion service than for an ordinary website: every file you convert, compress, merge or extract is uploaded to our servers and re-encoded there, so each job costs real processing time, storage and bandwidth. A page of text costs almost nothing to serve; a 4K video re-encode does not. Ads on the free tier and a small number of paid subscribers cover that bill.
So the most useful thing a happy user can do is help the next person find us. What follows is an honest menu — most of it takes a couple of minutes, none of it costs money, and you are under no obligation to do any of it. If you just wanted your file converted and want to close the tab, that is completely fine.
Not all help is equal, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A tweet disappears in a day; an answer on a Q&A site stays searchable for years. Rough guide:
| Way to help | Time it takes | What it actually changes |
|---|---|---|
| Trustpilot or Product Hunt review | ~2 minutes | Gives a first-time visitor a reason to trust an unfamiliar site with their file. Reviews are the thing people check before uploading anything. |
| Deep link to the tool you used | ~30 seconds | Direct referral. Highest conversion rate of anything here, because the person arrives with the job already half done. |
| Contextual link from a site you own | ~5 minutes | The only item on this list that compounds. Search engines treat an editorial link from a relevant page as a genuine signal, and it keeps sending people for years. |
| Answering a "how do I convert X to Y" question | ~5 minutes | Long tail. The thread stays indexed and keeps surfacing for the same question. Only worth doing where the tool genuinely answers the question. |
| A detailed bug report | ~5 minutes | Fixes the tool for everyone who hits the same file. Concretely more useful than a share if something is actually wrong. |
| Mentioning us in a tutorial or roundup | 30+ minutes | Highest impact, highest effort. Works best as one method among several, not as an advert. |
| A paid Basic or Pro plan | ~1 minute | Direct funding, and it removes ads for you. Entirely optional. |
If you are deciding where to spend the effort, it helps to know that most platforms deliberately strip the search-engine value out of outbound links. That does not make them worthless — a human still clicks — but it changes where a link is worth placing.
| Where | What works there | Passes search-ranking value? |
|---|---|---|
| Your own blog, docs site or wiki | A plain in-context link to the specific tool, inside a sentence that explains why | Yes — a normal followed link |
| Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Discord | Answer the actual question first; mention the tool only if it fits | Usually not. These platforms tag outbound links nofollow or ugc, and Google's own documentation says links marked with those attributes "will generally not be followed" |
| X, LinkedIn, Facebook | A short post naming the specific job you did | No — same treatment. The value is reach, not ranking |
| "Best free tools" roundups and comparison posts | A one-line entry with a link to a specific tool page | Usually yes, if the publisher does not mark the whole list as sponsored |
| Course notes, syllabi, internal team wikis | A link next to the assignment or workflow that needs it | Only if the page is publicly crawlable — but the referral value is real either way |
A request, not a rule: please do not mass-post, do not add us to Wikipedia, and do not drop a link into a thread the tool does not actually answer. Spammed mentions get removed, they annoy the community that removes them, and they do us more harm than the link is worth. One genuinely relevant answer beats twenty drive-by ones.
Bug reports and format requests go to the same place: the form on Contact Us, or [email protected]. What makes a report actionable:
Format requests are worth sending even if they seem obscure. Tell us what produced the file and what you need to open it in — that context is what decides whether a converter is worth building.
None of this is required, and the free tier is not going away. But if you use XConvert regularly and would rather pay than see ads, the Basic and Pro plans listed on the Pricing page are ad-free and carry higher file-size ceilings and more concurrent tasks; current rates are on that page. There is also a separately metered Developer API if you need conversion inside your own software rather than in a browser tab.
Yes, and more than sharing does. The main obstacle for any online converter is that a first-time visitor is about to hand a file to a website they have never heard of. Independent reviews are what they check first. A specific review — which tool you used, what the file was, whether the output was right — is far more persuasive than five stars with no text, because it reads like a person rather than a rating. It also helps us: reviews that describe a real job tell us which tools people actually rely on.
The catch is ads. The free tier shows advertising, and that is what pays for the servers that do the encoding. There is no trial that expires, no per-file cap that turns into a paywall after three conversions, no watermark stamped on the output and no account required to convert something. The optional Basic and Pro plans remove the ads and raise the limits, and there is a separately metered Developer API for programmatic use. That is the whole business model.
There is no account, no seat licence and no per-user gate, so nothing in the product stops you. Two caveats worth taking seriously. First, files are uploaded to our servers over an encrypted connection and processed there, so if your employer or institution restricts sending documents to third-party services, check that policy before you upload work material — that applies to every online converter, not only this one. Second, the licence terms covering our own site content, software and branding are set out in the Terms of Service. For regulated, confidential or client-owned material, a tool your organisation hosts itself is the safer answer, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The specific tool page, almost always. Someone who clicks "compress a JPEG" and lands on the homepage has to work out which of several thousand tools they wanted; someone who lands on Compress JPEG is one drag-and-drop from being finished. It is also more useful to your own readers, which is the part that matters if you are writing a tutorial. Good targets are the job-shaped pages — Video Compressor, Compress MP3, Merge Images to PDF — or a format hub such as Image Converter, Video Converter or Audio Converter when you want to cover a whole family at once.
Mostly not, and it is better to know that up front. Those platforms tag outbound links with nofollow or ugc, and Google's documentation on qualifying outbound links states that links marked with those attributes "will generally not be followed". What they do carry is people. A good answer in a thread that keeps ranking for "how do I convert X to Y" can send readers for years, which is worth more to us than the link attribute either way. So post where it genuinely helps someone, and do not treat it as an SEO exercise.
Send it through the Contact Us form and include four things: the source format, the target format, any options you changed, and what was wrong with the output. Attach the input file if you can — format bugs are usually specific to how one particular encoder wrote one particular file, and a description alone often is not enough to reproduce them. Add your email if you want an answer; the field is optional precisely so that people who just want to flag something can do it without handing over an address.
Yes, and specific requests are the useful kind. Tell us the extension, what created the file (a camera model, a piece of software, a scanner, a game engine), and what you need to open the result in. That last part matters more than it sounds: "convert to MP4" and "convert to something my 2014 TV will play" lead to different codec defaults. Obscure requests are welcome — a format nobody else converts is exactly the kind of gap worth filling.
Yes. You do not need permission to review us, to write a tutorial that uses one of our tools as a step, to include screenshots, or to put us in a comparison — including an unfavourable one. If you want the logo as a banner rather than a screenshot, there is one on the Link to Us page along with the HTML; save the image to your own server rather than hotlinking it from ours. The only thing we ask is that the link points at the tool page you actually wrote about.
It is uploaded over an encrypted connection and processed on our servers. An automated cleanup job then deletes files older than a few hours; in rare cases a file can sit there slightly longer before the sweep picks it up. Files are not shared or made public. The full detail, including what we log and why, is in the Privacy Policy, and there are more answers on the general FAQ page.