Media tools shouldn’t feel like a scavenger hunt.

CompressKits started with a familiar Tuesday-night problem: a 500 MB screen recording, an email attachment limit, and forty browser tabs of sketchy “free” converters — each hiding the download button behind three ads and a watermark.

The technology to do this properly is well understood — it just hadn’t been packaged with any respect for the person on the other side of the screen. So we set our rules and built around them:

• The free tier is the product. Not a demo, not bait. Watermarking someone’s memories is vandalism.
• Files are radioactive. We hold them as briefly as possible, encrypt them while we do, and delete them on a timer nobody can pause.
• Speed is a feature. Your time matters more than our server bill.
• The tool tells the truth. Honest progress bars, honest ETAs, honest quality estimates — and no invented numbers anywhere on this site, including this page.

Where we’re headed

7 tools are live today — compressors, converters and editors for video, images, PDFs and archives. The platform underneath is built to host many more, all with the same promise: fast, private, no dark patterns.