Little Toolworks

Compress a PDF to 5 MB

Five megabytes leaves room for a scan or a photo-heavy report while keeping its text selectable. The browser re-encodes only the images and repacks the file — nothing is uploaded.

Drop a PDF here, or click to choose

PDF up to 50 MB on Free · one at a time · nothing leaves your device

Free plan

How it works

  1. Your browser reads the PDF from your disk. No request carries the document.
  2. Text, fonts and vector drawings are copied unchanged. Pages are never turned into images, so text stays selectable and searchable.
  3. Embedded images are scaled and re-encoded as JPEG, and only when the new data is smaller. Then the file is repacked with compressed object streams.
  4. If 5 MB cannot be reached, it reports the smallest honest result. It does not fake success by rasterising the document.

What fits in 5 MB

A lot of scans fit. 5 MB is generous compared with the 2 MB many portals demand. A multi-page photo document often needs only modest downscaling to land there, so the pages keep more resolution than they would at a tighter target.

Text-heavy files still will not shrink. If the PDF is mostly text, fonts and structure, there is almost nothing to re-encode. In testing, a 142-page text publication saved 14 KB from its single image; no amount of repacking would bring it under 5 MB without destroying the text layer.

Check whether the limit is real. If a portal accepts 10 MB, choosing 5 MB only throws away image quality. Use the largest target the destination allows.

The count is strict. We treat 1 MB as 1,000,000 bytes, so a 5 MB result is at most 5,000,000 bytes — safely under a portal using the binary reading.

Pricing

Free

$0

  • Targets of 10 MB, 5 MB and 2 MB
  • PDFs up to 50 MB
  • One file at a time
  • No upload, no account, no watermark

Pro

$5/month

  • Adds the 1 MB and 500 KB targets
  • PDFs up to 200 MB
  • Batch: compress up to 10 PDFs at once
  • One subscription unlocks Pro in every Little Toolworks tool

Billed by Creem. Cancel any time with Manage or cancel subscription. Access is activated automatically after payment.

Restore Pro

Already paid in another browser? Paste the key Creem emailed you. Restoring checks that your subscription is still active.

Questions

Is 5 MB good for email?

Yes. It is well within normal attachment limits. Note that mail encoding adds roughly a third to the transmitted size, so a 5 MB file travels as about 6.7 MB.

Why is my text PDF still 5 MB?

Text, fonts and page structure take space that cannot be removed without rasterising the pages. This tool will not do that, so it reports the smallest honest result instead.

Will images look worse?

They may be scaled or re-encoded at a lower quality, but the result card reports what happened. Compare the page count and dimensions before you send the file.

Can I go below 5 MB?

Yes — the free page also offers 2 MB. Pro adds 1 MB and 500 KB. Pick the largest target the destination accepts to keep the most quality.

Is the document uploaded?

No. Parsing, image re-encoding and repacking all happen in this tab.

Does it work on password-protected PDFs?

Files that require a password to open cannot be parsed. Remove the password in a PDF reader first, then compress.