Terms of service
Almost everything on this site is free and needs no account. Where something is paid for, this page says plainly what it includes, what it does not, and what we do not promise.
These terms apply to convertburda.com, to everything you buy on this site, and to the CBCOM desktop editions of the studios. Where a section applies to only one of those, it says so.
1. Who we are
Convertburda ("we", "us") is operated by Quality Castings Bv, based in Belgium and hosted entirely within the European Union. The site is built and maintained by RASS (Red ALMA Software Solutions) for QCSS (Quality Castings Software Solutions). For anything about an order, an invoice or these terms, write to [email protected]; when a tool misbehaves, write to [email protected].
2. What Convertburda is
Convertburda is a collection of conversion, calculation and file tools, each on its own page, together with five larger workspaces — the CBCOM Audio, Video, Photo, Document and CAD Studios — that bring a whole category together on one screen instead of sending you from tool to tool. Every page exists in ten languages, each on its own address. There is nothing to install to use the website: you use it in your browser.
Most tools run entirely on your own device. Your file is never uploaded and does not reach our servers at all. A few conversions genuinely need our server — the e-invoicing and Office conversions, e-mail to PDF, PDF locking, archive conversion, and the heavier CAD and 3D conversions. For those, your file is processed only for the duration of that one request, in memory or in a temporary folder that is deleted the moment the conversion ends, whether it succeeded or failed. Each tool page states which of the two it is. Our privacy policy describes this in full.
3. Free use, and the limits on it
Most of this site is free to use and needs no account. The PDF tools, the developer and data tools, the machining and metalwork calculators and the engineering and physics tools are free permanently, and so is drawing in the CBCOM CAD Studio, including the download of what you drew. Advertising covers the running cost of the servers, and a smaller number of people pay for a day pass, credits or a plan when they need the studios or the heavier server-side conversions. That is the whole model: we do not sell data, and we do not put a tool behind a login purely to collect an e-mail address.
The server-side conversions are counted per day, and per tool. Each of the lighter server tools — the e-invoicing and Office conversions, e-mail to PDF, PDF locking, archive conversion — gives you 5 free conversions a day, and each of the heavy CAD and 3D conversions 2 a day; the badge at the top of every one of those pages shows what you have left on that tool. PDF/A is the exception with no free allowance at all, for the reason given in section 5. That counter lives only in our server's memory: it is never written to disk, never logged, and is discarded at the latest at the end of the day. When we gave you nothing, the turn goes back: the engines were busy, your file was refused as empty or too large, the conversion ran out of time, or your connection dropped. A conversion that fails because the file itself is damaged does count — that is the brake that keeps the free capacity there for everyone.
The browser-side tools are not counted, because they cost us nothing to run. They are bounded by size and length instead — a maximum video or audio length, a number of images a day, a size per image — and every tool page states its own limit before you use it rather than after. A free video or GIF export also carries a small mark. Each server tool has its own maximum upload as well, from 5 MB to 50 MB depending on the work, and its page states it before you choose a file; the archive converter is the exception at 100 MB. Nothing can exceed 64 MB per request in any case — that is what the machine can hold at once.
4. Your account
An account is free and you never need one for the free tools. It stores three things: your e-mail address, a salted hash of your password (we cannot read the password itself) and the date the account was created — no name, no address, no profile. You confirm your e-mail address once to activate the account, and that confirmation is also the moment the 100 welcome credits are added.
If you arrive through someone's referral link, you receive 25 extra credits on top of those, again as soon as you confirm your e-mail address, and the person who referred you receives 150 credits at your first paid purchase. The link is remembered in your browser for 30 days. The programme itself will not run forever, and when it ends it ends for new links only: credits already on an account stay there. They are spent as you use them, never cleared on a date.
You can delete your account yourself at any time from your profile page. Deletion is immediate and permanent, and it takes your credits and your unlocked categories with it — so spend a balance before you delete. The one thing that stays is an invoice: a paid order remains in our bookkeeping for seven years, because the law requires it.
5. What is paid for, and what it gives you
Everything paid for on this site is a single payment for a fixed period, and none of it is a subscription: a 24-hour day pass on one category, with or without an account; a category plan of one, six or twelve months, which gives unlimited use of that whole category, its studio included; two categories together at a reduced rate; full access, which does the same for all five paid categories; or credits, with which you pay per file. Buying a studio outright is a separate thing and is described in section 8. Nothing renews itself and nothing is ever charged again, so there is no subscription to cancel; when a period ends, it simply ends. Renewing a plan or full access early costs nothing extra — the time you have left is added on top. A day pass works differently: it always runs 24 hours from the moment you buy it, so buying a second one for the same category while the first is still running replaces it. The prices are on the pricing page, and checkout charges exactly the amount that page shows you.
PDF/A is the one exception, and it is deliberate. It is not part of full access and never has been. It is bought on its own — as a plan, as a day pass, or at 150 credits per file — and it is the one feature with no free daily allowance. The reason is cost rather than principle: PDF/A is a conformance standard, ISO 19005, not a setting on an ordinary PDF, so every font, the colour profile and the structural metadata have to live inside the document itself, the office documents are converted on our own machines, and a validator at the receiving end will check that all of it is there. That per-file cost is why this one feature is charged for while the rest of the PDF toolbox is free.
In the studios, paying is a choice rather than a wall. Using them is always free; the check happens only when you export. Export without paying and you still get your file — it simply carries CONVERTBURDA.COM. Spend credits (50 for a video, 40 for audio, 25 for a photo, 25 for a document) or hold a plan or pass that covers it, and the file comes out clean. The CBCOM CAD Studio costs nothing at all, drawing and download included, because CAD is sold as conversion and not as a drawing program. Two exports are not free with a mark. A PDF/A file out of the CBCOM Document Studio is an archive file produced to an ISO standard, so it needs the PDF/A plan, a PDF/A day pass, or 150 credits — exactly like any other PDF/A file here. And audio cannot carry a visible mark at all, so a free audio export is limited to 128 kbps instead, and the studio says so on screen when that happens.
And what a payment does not do, said plainly. The page banners are part of how the free site is paid for: a plan or full access removes them, a day pass does not. Credits remove our mark only where credits are actually charged, so in the CBCOM CAD Studio — where nothing is charged — there is nothing for them to do. A day pass is granted to the browser you buy it in, whether or not you are signed in: it is not stored on your account. Clear that browser's cookies, use a private window, or move to another device inside the 24 hours, and the pass does not travel with you. A category plan is bound to your account instead, which is what to take if you need it on more than one machine.
Convertburda stays free partly because a small line of provenance travels with the files our engine makes. On the free tier that is the mark CONVERTBURDA.COM in the file's own metadata, and on some outputs a light visible watermark. Please leave it in place — if you pass a free file on to someone else, the attribution goes with it. On a paid file every visible watermark is gone and what remains is an invisible metadata line reading CONVERTBURDA.COM-PRO LICENSE: not an advert, simply a record that the file came out of our licensed engine, which is unavoidable since every file passes through it. Either way the content of your file is never read, uploaded or stored — only that label is written.
6. Prices, VAT, payment and invoices
Every price on this site includes VAT, and what you see is what you pay. Belgian VAT at 21% applies to private buyers, in Belgium and elsewhere in the European Union. For a buyer outside the European Union no European VAT is charged. An EU business outside Belgium whose VAT number we validate through VIES, the European Commission's official service, is invoiced with the VAT reverse-charged; a Belgian business is invoiced with Belgian VAT like any other Belgian buyer. Entering a VAT number never changes the amount you pay — it changes how the invoice is drawn up. Prices are also lower in some regions of the world than in others; where that applies the pricing page says so, and checkout charges exactly the amount shown.
Payments are handled entirely by Mollie, our payment provider. You can pay by bank card, credit card and the other methods Mollie offers, and your card or bank details reach only Mollie — we never see them and never store them. What we keep is the payment reference.
Every purchase produces an invoice. For a private purchase it carries only what we already had: your e-mail address and the country the payment came from — we never ask a private buyer for a name or an address. Only if you tick I am buying for a business do we also record the company name, the address and, if you give one, the VAT number, because those are what the law requires on a business invoice. Invoices are kept for seven years, as Belgian bookkeeping law requires, and an invoice is the one record that outlives deleting your account.
For the moment invoices are drawn up by hand: ask us at [email protected], quoting the invoice number shown on your profile page or on the confirmation page you landed on after paying, and we will send it to you.
7. Credits
Credits are the pay-per-file route for people who do not want a plan: buy a pack, then spend only on the tools you actually use. The packs and what each one contains are on the pricing page, and the larger packs include bonus credits on top. Credits are tied to your account — and so are plans, full access and a purchase. The 24-hour day pass is the only paid route that works without one.
Credits do not expire. A pack is yours until you spend it: the balance goes down as you use it and is never cleared at the end of a month or a year. That is a standing promise, not a temporary offer.
What a job costs: 25 credits for a server-side office or e-invoicing conversion, 50 for a heavy CAD or 3D conversion, 150 for a PDF/A file, and 50/40/25/25 for a clean export out of the Video, Audio, Photo and Document Studios. 25 credits lift a size or length cap for one visit, and enlarging an image beyond the free limit costs 25. Credits are only ever charged for something you asked for, and the amount is shown before you confirm. Deleting your account deletes the balance with it.
8. The desktop editions: trial and licence
The CBCOM desktop editions of the five studios are sold on this site, and these terms cover them. The download is not open yet; these are the terms it opens under. Downloading will carry no conditions at all — no account, no e-mail address, no payment details — and you will then have 14 days to use the edition in full, with everything switched on and nothing to cancel. After installing you sign in with your Convertburda account or paste a licence key.
After those 14 days, without a licence there is no further access. The free route is and stays this website: everything described in section 3 keeps working in your browser, for nothing, whether or not you ever install anything.
A purchase is a purchase: the software does not switch itself off. Included are 24 months of updates, support and access to the paid parts of the website, and those 24 months begin on the day you pay. When that window ends, everything that runs on your own computer keeps working; what stops is updates, PDF/A, the conversions that run on our servers, and the ad-free website. Renewing costs a quarter of the yearly price at that moment, never less than €9.99, and brings all of it back — including everything that was added in the meantime.
A licence belongs to your account and is activated on a device. Activation happens online once; after that the software runs offline. The device identifier is a random number we generate, not a fingerprint of your hardware, and one licence covers two devices at a time.
9. Your files, back-ups and availability
We keep nothing, and that has a consequence worth stating: there is no back-up on our side and nothing can be recovered. A file handled by a browser-side tool never reaches us at all; a file handled by a server-side tool is deleted the moment the conversion ends. Work that is open in a tool or a studio lives in your browser's memory, so reloading the page, closing the tab or switching the site's language loses it. Keep your own copies as you go.
There is no cloud storage on this site: everything stays on your own device. If that ever changes, it will be described here before it takes effect.
The server-side conversions run one job at a time per engine on a machine we rent, so at a busy moment your conversion waits in a queue, and it can be answered with a plain "temporarily unavailable" instead. When that happens the attempt costs you nothing, and that is built in rather than promised: the free turn goes back, and a conversion that fails never spends credits. We cannot promise the site is never interrupted. If a paid feature is unavailable for long enough to matter, write to us at the address in section 12 while your period is still running, so that we can put it right.
Whether a third party accepts a file is their decision and not something we can settle for you: a PDF/A file is checked by a validator at the receiving end, an e-invoice by the receiving system, a converted drawing by whoever opens it. The machining and metalwork calculators give you a starting point, and each of those pages carries that warning on the page: check it against your machine's real limits and your tool manufacturer's data, and begin with a light test pass. Anything that drives a machine is yours to read and verify before you run it — which is also why we hand a G-code file back unchanged rather than editing machine code. Where any other tool has a genuine limit, its page says so before you use it rather than after.
None of this affects the rights you have as a consumer under the mandatory law of your own country: where such a right and these terms disagree, the law wins and these terms give way.
10. Acceptable use
The files you put into a tool are yours, and so is the responsibility for them. We never see the browser-side ones and never keep the server-side ones, so whether you are allowed to process a particular file is something only you can know.
Please do not work around the limits. The daily counts, the size caps and the queue exist so that the free tools stay available to everyone — they are the reason a free tier can exist at all. Automated or bulk calling of the server-side tools is refused: we allow only a few conversions at a time per address and answer the rest with an error. A day pass is for the browser it was bought in and a plan for the account it was bought on; both are meant for your own use.
Two things we refuse outright, so that you know where we stand. We do not do people-search: no looking up an individual's phone number or e-mail address, here or with our help. Checking whether an e-mail address is well-formed, or which country a phone number belongs to, is a different matter entirely — that tells you nothing about a person. And on a free file, leave the attribution where it is — that small credit is our fee for the work, and it is what keeps the tools free for the next person.
11. Changes to these terms
When the tools, the products or the prices change, this page is updated and the date at the top is refreshed; a significant change is described here before it takes effect. A change applies from the moment it is published and never backwards: a period you have already paid for keeps the terms it was sold under, and credits already on your account stay yours. If you do not agree with a change, you simply do not buy again — nothing you already hold is touched.
One thing this section cannot change: the categories named as free in section 3 stay free. A change here can never move them behind a payment.
12. Questions and complaints
Write to us — we read every message. Use [email protected] for anything about an order, an invoice or these terms, [email protected] when a tool misbehaves, and [email protected] for a tool you would like to see. This is a small operation, so a reply can take a couple of working days, and a detailed technical question sometimes longer — we would rather test the answer than guess at it.
If a payment went wrong, write to support with the e-mail address you paid with and roughly when you paid. Payments run through Mollie and every one of them leaves a record on our side, so this is almost always something we can put right quickly. Please do not pay a second time; that only creates a refund to sort out afterwards.
If you are unhappy with an order, an invoice or a tool, tell us at [email protected] and say what you expected and what you got. Every complaint reaches a person rather than a form, and we answer within the time given above.
A complaint about how we handle your personal data comes to us first, and if that does not settle it you can lodge it with a supervisory authority — in Belgium the Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit. Our privacy policy sets out what we do and do not store, and we answer such a request within one month.