If you work with PDFs regularly and you’re running your own infrastructure, Stirling PDF is hard to beat. It’s a self-hosted, web-based PDF toolbox with over 50 operations — merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, edit, watermark, rotate, and a whole lot more. It’s built on Java/Spring Boot with LibreOffice and Tesseract doing the heavy lifting under the hood. At 75,000+ GitHub stars and counting, it’s become one of the most popular self-hosted apps in the homelab community.
In this post I’ll walk through how I deploy it on my Talos Linux Kubernetes cluster using Ansible and the official Helm chart, and break down what you get on the free tier versus a paid plan.