Every tool on this site is free and asks nothing of you — no account, no email, no limit on how many files you run. One optional thing costs money: HermitFile Pro, $39 a year or $7 a month. Most of this page is about that, and about the things we deliberately do not promise.
Who you are dealing with
HermitFile is operated by an individual in Pennsylvania, United States. There is no support desk and no ticket system — there is one email address, hello@hermitfile.com, and it is read by the person who built the site.
The free tools
Every tool is free to use and none of them needs an account. Free use covers one file per job, forever — running more than one file through a tool in the same job is Pro. Two things are never limited and never will be: the size of a file, because we are not paying to receive it, and how quickly you may do one job after another, because there is no queue here to protect. They run entirely inside your own browser; nothing you open is uploaded to us. You can use the results for anything, commercial work included, and you do not owe us a credit.
Nothing about a job is kept between visits — there is no count to keep, so there is nothing in your browser's storage to clear and nothing sent anywhere. It is a price we are asking you to honour on the job in front of you, not a lock.
They are provided as they are. We have tested them and we fix what we find, but we cannot promise a given file will open, convert or compress the way you expect — browsers differ, and some files are damaged before they reach us. Keep your originals. A tool here should never be the only copy of something you care about.
The one thing we sell
HermitFile Pro. Every tool keeps working free, one file at a time, with or without it. Pro is what runs a whole batch or folder at once instead of one file per job, and adds the parts that only matter if you come back — keeping the settings you use, passing a file from one tool to the next without downloading it, and one-click fixes that put a photo or document inside an official specification.
- Price. $39 US dollars a year, or $7 US dollars a month, including any card fees. That is the whole price. There is no setup fee and no separate charge for any individual tool.
- It is a subscription, and it renews. The yearly plan renews once a year; the monthly plan renews once a month. It continues until you cancel it. We say this here because it is the single most important fact about the price.
- Cancelling. One click, from the billing page or from the one-click cancel link in every renewal email. There is no early termination fee and no cancellation flow to navigate. Cancelling stops the next charge; it does not delete anything, because everything you have saved lives in your own browser.
- Every renewal is emailed. Each renewal sends a new key, with a one-click cancel link in the same message. The date the key you already hold runs until is printed on it.
- What you get is a signed licence key, emailed to you, which your own browser verifies offline. There is no account and no login. The key contains a plan name and two dates — no email address, no customer number, no device identifier.
- Delivery. The key arrives by email after payment. The Pro features switch on in whichever browsers you paste it into.
- Payment. Taken by Stripe on Stripe's own page. Your card details never touch this site, and we never see them.
- When it expires, the Pro features switch off and every free tool carries on exactly as before. Nothing you made stops working and nothing is taken away.
Refunds — 30 days, no questions
If you want your money back, email hello@hermitfile.com within 30 days of a charge and you will get it back. You do not have to explain and you do not have to prove anything. That applies to a first payment and to a renewal you did not want. The refund goes to the card you paid with, through Stripe, and usually lands in five to ten business days depending on your bank.
Beyond 30 days we will refund the unused part of a yearly plan pro rata, without asking why.
We can offer that because arguing about a $39 subscription would cost us more than the refund does.
What we do not promise
This is the section that matters most, and it is the reason it is written plainly instead of buried.
We do not guarantee that any photo will be accepted. We are not the authority that decides. What we do is make the file match the published measurements — the dimensions, the file weight, and where the head sits in the frame where a head rule is published. That is a real and commonly failed requirement, and it is the part a computer can check honestly.
What we check against the published specification: pixel dimensions, file size in KB, and whether the source photo is sharp enough to fill the frame without being enlarged. These are numbers the issuing authority publishes, and if any of them fails we do not sell you the file at all — we tell you what is wrong and you fix it and check again, free, as many times as you like.
What we measure about the photograph itself: whether the background is plain, light enough and evenly lit; whether the picture is in focus, correctly exposed and in colour. These are our own measurements rather than rules quoted from the authority, so they are shown as advice and they do not block a purchase. We would rather tell you a wall looks patterned and be wrong than refuse your money over our own guesswork.
What we still do not check, and cannot: your expression, glare or tint on glasses, head coverings, whether the photo is recent enough, and whether it looks like you. We also do not measure head height — we draw the guides and you place your head inside them. Recognising a face reliably would mean shipping megabytes of somebody else’s code to a site whose entire claim is that it ships none, so we do not do it, and we do not pretend to. Those remaining items need a human eye.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any government, passport agency, embassy, consulate or visa service. We read the published specifications, name the source on the page, and link to it. Specifications change without notice. If your application matters, check the current rule at the issuing authority yourself before you submit. If you find one of ours out of date, email us and it will be corrected — that email is worth more to us than a subscription.
Fair use of the tools
Do not use anything here to forge, alter or falsify an identity document, or to make a photograph of a person who has not agreed to it being used on a document. That is the whole of the acceptable-use policy and it should not need saying, but it is said.
Where the liability stops
If something here goes wrong, what you can recover from us is what you paid us — at most the subscription price you were charged, and nothing for a free tool, because nothing is what it cost. We are not liable for a rejected application, a missed appointment, a rebooking fee, expedited postage, a cancelled trip or any other knock-on cost. This is a site made by one person, priced accordingly, and it cannot carry the risk of your travel plans. Nothing here limits any liability that the law does not allow to be limited.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer somewhere with stronger mandatory protections, you keep those — this paragraph does not take them away.
Changes
If these terms change materially, the effective date at the top of this page changes with them and the change is described here. The 30-day unconditional refund and the promise that your files are never uploaded are the two things that will not be quietly weakened. How we handle your data is a separate page: Privacy.