Documentation
Everything you need to use Formatly effectively.
Converting a file
Converting is designed to take 3 clicks:
- Pick a tool — browse the tools grid on the home page and click the converter that matches your needs (e.g. "PNG → JPG").
- Upload your file — drag & drop it into the dropzone, or click to browse.
- Choose output format and click Convert — select the target format from the available options and hit Convert.
When the conversion finishes, a Download button appears. Your converted file will download with a clean filename.
Supported formats
Images
PNG, JPG, JPEG, WEBP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, HEIC, HEIF, SVG, TIFF
Video
MP4, MOV, AVI, WEBM, MKV, WMV, FLV, M4V, 3GP, MPEG, TS, MTS, M2TS, VOB, OGV (legacy / broadcast / DVD containers are input-only — convert them to MP4, MOV, AVI or WEBM)
Audio
MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A, OPUS, AIFF, WMA, AMR, M4B, MP2, AC3 (legacy audio is input-only — convert it to MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A, OPUS or AIFF)
Documents
PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV, DOC, XLS, PPT, ODT, ODS, ODP, RTF, TXT (plus EPUB as an output; legacy DOC/XLS/PPT modernise to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX)
Data & subtitles
CSV, XLSX, JSON, SRT, VTT (CSV ⇄ XLSX ⇄ JSON; SRT ⇄ VTT)
Tip: any image (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WEBP, TIFF…) can also be converted straight to PDF.
Limits & quotas
Limits depend on your plan:
- Free (no account): 5 conversions per day, max 25 MB per file
- Free (account): 10 conversions per day, max 25 MB per file, conversion history
- Developer API (every plan, incl. Free): a self-serve API key; Free includes 250 credits/month, pay-as-you-go beyond (card required). One credit pool covers web + API — see the API docs.
- Pro: max 500 MB per file, batch up to 50 files, and the full Tools tab — 33 tools (OCR, PDF redaction, PDF/CSV/Office repair, PDF rotate / split / merge / compress / page-extract / page-delete / password-protect / unlock / to-text / image-extract, image & video compression, image resize & crop, background removal, image filters (greyscale/sepia/invert), audio & video mute / trim / loudness-normalise, PDF watermark removal, face pixelation, metadata strip). Includes a self-serve REST API key — 3,000 credits/month, one pool for the web app and the API.
- Business: everything in Pro + REST API. Max 5 GB per file, 750 req/min API, 25,000 credits/month (one pool, web + API), batch up to 150 files, priority support.
- Enterprise (contact sales): everything in Business, with custom-negotiated limits and a fixed credit ceiling (no overage). Dedicated contact; a mutual NDA available on request.COMING SOON
Conversions are metered in credits (Free 250 · Pro 3,000 · Business 25,000 per month, one pool for web + API). Need more? Email support@formatly.pro for a higher-volume plan.
CV → Spreadsheet
CV → Spreadsheet turns a stack of CVs into one candidate table. Drop up to 50 files (PDF, DOCX or DOC) and you get a row per CV — name, email, phone, current title, employer, location, LinkedIn, skills and years of experience.
Extraction is roughly 90% accurate, and we'd rather say so than pretend: any field the parser isn't confident about is highlighted in the review table. Click a highlighted cell to correct it, then export to CSV — or copy the table straight into Excel / Google Sheets.
Pro tool. Every account gets one CV free to try it; Pro and above parse full stacks. Costs 5 credits per CV from your monthly pool. Scanned CVs are OCR'd automatically.
Transcription
Transcribe → Text turns a recording — an interview, a meeting, a podcast, a lecture — into text. Drop up to 10 audio or video files (MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4, MOV and more) and you get the transcript back, plus subtitle files: download .txt, .srt or .vtt.
The language is detected automatically, or you can pick one (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese) — telling us the language up front is a little more accurate on short or noisy clips. As with the CV parser, treat the transcript as a strong first draft: names, jargon and crosstalk are where it slips, so read it before you rely on it.
Business tool. Every account (including Free and Pro) gets one recording free to try it; Business transcribes as much as you like. Charged from your monthly credit pool by file size and type, like every other tool. Files can be up to 2 hours and 2 GB each — big enough for full-length video, not just short audio; split anything longer than 2 hours. Transcription is compute-heavy, so a long recording is a genuinely long job — roughly a few minutes for an hour of audio. Leave the tab open; it keeps polling.
Search in files
Search in files finds a word or phrase across a whole batch at once — up to 50 files. It reads plain text and CSV, PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets (including the cell reference, e.g. Staff!B4), and photos and scans via OCR, so a word inside a picture is found too.
Every hit comes back with where it came from — page and line, paragraph, or sheet and cell — and the surrounding text with the match highlighted. Matching is case-insensitive by default; tick Whole word only to stop cat matching concatenate. Your search term is treated as literal text, never as a pattern, so punctuation like 10.99 means exactly that.
Pro tool. Every account gets one file free to try it; Pro and above search a whole pile at once. Charged from your monthly credit pool by file size and type, like every other tool. Your search term is never written to our logs or your account history.
Creating an account
Click Sign up in the nav, enter your email and a password (minimum 8 characters). You'll be signed in immediately and your session lasts 30 days.
We don't send marketing emails — we only email you for account-related things (password reset, receipts).
Upgrading your plan
From the Pricing page, choose Go Pro or Go Business and enter your payment details. Stripe handles the payment securely — we never see or store your card information.
Your new plan activates immediately. To cancel, switch, or change your card, sign in and open My Account → Manage subscription — it routes you through Stripe's secure billing portal where you can cancel in two clicks or upgrade with automatic proration. No fees, no questions; access continues until the current billing period ends.
Conversion history
Signed-in users can see their recent conversions in the My Account panel (click your email in the nav). The last 20 are shown there; any account with an API key (every plan) can pull its full history via GET /api/v1/history — up to 100 records per request, paginated with limit and offset.
How your files are handled
We take privacy seriously:
- Files are uploaded via HTTPS to our server
- Processed in place — never shared with third parties
- Automatically deleted after 1 hour from both upload and output folders
- Never used to train AI models or anything else
- Download links expire 15 minutes after the conversion completes
Exception: if a Business or Enterprise user mints a signed URL for a converted file via the API, that one file is kept until the URL expires (up to 30 days) so the link stays valid — then it's deleted. Every other file still goes within 1 hour.
What data we store & export
We're transparent about what we keep:
- Account data: your email, hashed password (with individual salt), account creation date
- Conversion history: the conversion types you performed (e.g. "PNG → JPG") and timestamps — NOT the file contents
- Payment data: handled entirely by Stripe. We only see a subscription status
- Server logs: IP addresses for rate limiting, retained for 30 days
You can delete your account at any time from the account panel. This permanently removes all your data.
GDPR / data portability: To download a copy of your data (account details and conversion history), sign in, open My Account, and click Export my data. This produces a JSON file of all information we hold about you.
Troubleshooting
My conversion failed
Most common causes:
- The file is corrupted — try opening it in its original app first to check
- The file has no audio track (trying to extract MP3 from a silent video)
- You've hit the daily limit (Free: 5/day without an account, 10/day with one)
Upload keeps failing
Check the file size. Free users have a 25 MB limit; Pro users 500 MB; Business and Enterprise users 5 GB. If the file is larger than your plan allows, compress it first or upgrade.
The download link expired
Download links expire 15 minutes after the conversion completes. Just upload the file and run the conversion again.
I forgot my password
Click Sign in, then Forgot password? Enter your email and we'll send a reset link. The link expires in 1 hour and is single-use.
Contact support
We respond to every support email — Pro, Business and Enterprise users get priority. We don't quote specific response times publicly so we never over-promise; in practice most replies go out within a few hours on weekdays.