Why we built this
In April 2025, a close friend was applying for SSC CGL. His photo kept getting rejected — first because it was 70 KB (limit: 50 KB), then because it was 18 KB (minimum: 20 KB), then because the dimensions were 2 pixels off. He was using iLovePDF and SmallPDF, both of which give you a vague slider and no way to hit a specific number.
He missed the original deadline. Got an extension by paying a late fee. Eventually applied with the same photo, manually trial-and-errored 14 times until it landed at exactly 32 KB.
The technology to solve this is trivial: a binary search loop over compression quality, running entirely in the browser. We built a prototype in a weekend. It worked.
What made us keep building was the second realisation: the existing tools were uploading sensitive documents — Aadhaar, PAN, signed contracts, visa photos — to cloud servers run by foreign companies. Convenient, sure. But every upload is a leak risk, and the privacy-cost was being borne by users who didn't know they were paying it.
FormReady is what we wanted to give him. Free single-file compression, exact KB targeting, zero upload, built for Indian forms. We open-source the compression engine on GitHub so anyone can verify the privacy claim.