Free, unlimited,
and here's why that's possible.

The cap isn't greed. It's arithmetic.

When you drop a photo on a typical online converter, the file is uploaded to a machine that company rents. That machine decodes the HEVC, re-encodes a JPG, stores the result until you fetch it, and sends it back. Every one of those steps costs money, per file, forever. Your batch of 400 photos is a line item on somebody's invoice.

Given that, "unlimited and free" would be a promise to let strangers spend unbounded amounts of their money. Nobody sane offers it. So they cap the free tier, sell a paid one to the people who need more, and the free tier exists as a sample. That's a coherent business, honestly run, and the caps aren't a trap — they're the price of the architecture.

FreeConvert, for instance, publishes its free tier plainly on its pricing page:

"Free users get 20 conversion minutes per day for both Web and API use."

"This means up to 20 files per day can be converted for free."

"a limit of 5 conversion minutes per file for free usage."

That's a reasonable free tier, and we'd say so on any day of the week. Twenty files a day, for nothing, from a company paying for real hardware, with the limit written down where you can read it before you start rather than discovered at file twenty-one. The complaint isn't that the cap is unfair. It's that a cap of twenty is no use at all when you have a camera roll of eight hundred — and no amount of goodwill changes that, because the constraint is physics and accounting, not attitude.

The same page describes the mechanics without embarrassment:

"we upload your files over a secure HTTPS connection"

That's the architecture, stated accurately, and their HEIC page also lists a max file size of 1 GB — which is generous, and only possible because a server has the room. Uploading is a legitimate way to build a converter; it's how most of them work. It just means someone else's computer touches your photo, and someone else's bill grows with your batch. Both of those follow from the same decision.

Why a local converter can honestly say "no limit"

Your browser can decode and re-encode images itself. The standard open-source HEIC decoder, libheif, compiles to WebAssembly — real compiled code running at near-native speed inside a tab. So the page downloads the decoder once, about 1.4 MB, and after that does every conversion on your own CPU.

Which means the marginal cost of your five-hundredth photo, to whoever wrote the page, is zero. Not "low". Zero. There's no server in the loop to bill anyone. Metering it would be inventing a limit for the pleasure of enforcing it, so there's no cap, no account, and no watermark — not out of generosity, but because there's nothing there to charge for.

The privacy consequence is a side effect rather than the point: photos that never go anywhere can't be stored, mined, or covered by a terms-of-service clause. And you can verify the whole claim in ten seconds by turning off your Wi-Fi and converting anyway — that test is on its own page, and it works on any converter, including this one.

We've left the third row vague on purpose. We only put numbers in this table that we have read on the source's own page and can link you to, and a table that invents plausible-looking figures for companies we didn't check would be exactly the genre of writing this site exists to be an alternative to.

So where are the limits here?

"Unlimited" with no asterisks would be its own kind of marketing. There are four real constraints, and none of them is a plan you can upgrade:

• Your device's memory. Hundreds of photos at once on a desktop is unremarkable. A phone with 3 GB of RAM is still a phone with 3 GB of RAM, and iOS is quick to reclaim memory from a tab, so work in smaller groups there. This is usually far more generous than a free tier — but it is a ceiling, and it's yours.
• Big zips. Building a zip means holding the archive and the source files in memory at the same time, and browsers cap how much a single blob can hold. Very large batches are more reliable saved individually; the app warns you before you hit the wall rather than after.
• EXIF is dropped. Dates, camera model, GPS. The photo is decoded to pixels and re-encoded, and the metadata doesn't survive the trip. Rotation is applied, so nothing lands sideways. If your archive needs its timestamps, this isn't the tool for that job yet.
• Your files get bigger. About 168% of the HEIC at the default quality of 0.85 — 2 MB in, roughly 3.4 MB out. WebP saves about 8% and is still larger than the HEIC; PNG is lossless and roughly twelve times the size. Every HEIC-to-JPG converter does this, uploading or not: it's the codecs, not the tool. Drop the quality toward 0.6 to land near the original size, with loss you'll be able to see.

Two more worth stating: the decoder is a 1.4 MB download on first use, once — a network request that doesn't contain your photo. And the output formats are JPG, PNG, WebP and PDF (see the HEIC to PDF guide). Video and other exotic formats aren't here — if you need those you need a cloud tool, and we'd rather say that than waste your afternoon.

How this is paid for

By ads. There are ad slots on this page and on the converter, marked "Advertisement", and that's the entire revenue model. It's worth saying plainly, because "free and unlimited" ought to prompt the question — and the honest answer to "what's the catch" is more convincing than a claim that there isn't one.

What there isn't: no account to create, no email to hand over, no upsell to a Pro tier, no watermark, and no data to sell, because your files never reach us in the first place. That last one isn't a virtue we're claiming so much as a shape the architecture forced. There's genuinely nothing here to monetise except the space around the tool.

Questions people actually ask

Keep reading

• Batch converting hundreds at once — folder drops, zip limits, and the size maths.
• Converting without uploading — the ten-second test that proves any converter.
• Is FreeConvert safe? — the fair, sourced answer.