PDFluent runs entirely in-process. No HTTP calls to external services, no telemetry, no license server checks at runtime. Your documents stay inside your infrastructure.
use pdfluent::{Sdk, SdkOptions};
fn main() -> pdfluent::Result<()> {
// All processing is in-process — no network calls at any point
let sdk = Sdk::with_options(SdkOptions {
license_key: Some(std::env::var("PDFLUENT_LICENSE_KEY").unwrap()),
// No phone-home, no telemetry, no cloud dependency
..SdkOptions::default()
})?;
let doc = sdk.open("patient_record.pdf")?;
// Process locally — document bytes never leave this machine
let page_count = doc.page_count();
let text = doc.extract_text()?;
println!("Processed {} pages ({} chars) on-premise", page_count, text.len());
// Redact sensitive fields before storing the result
let redacted = doc.redact_by_pattern(r"\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}")?; // SSN pattern
redacted.save("patient_record_redacted.pdf")?;
Ok(())
}Run cargo add pdfluent to get started.
PDFluent is a pure Rust library. At runtime it makes no outbound HTTP requests. License validation uses a file-based key — no license server is contacted during document processing. You can verify this with a network monitor or in a strictly firewalled environment.
The Enterprise tier includes explicit support for air-gapped networks. The binary has no hard dependency on any external network resource. Deploy to a machine with no internet access and it works identically.
When you use a SaaS PDF API, your documents travel to a third-party server. With PDFluent, documents are processed in your own process on your own infrastructure. Data residency requirements — EU GDPR, Swiss DPA, HIPAA, FedRAMP — are met by default because no data leaves your environment.
PDFluent runs anywhere a Rust binary runs. In an internal Kubernetes cluster with network egress disabled, on an AWS EC2 instance inside a private VPC with no NAT gateway, or on a bare-metal server with no internet route — the behavior is identical in all cases.
SaaS PDF APIs charge per page or per API call, which makes cost unpredictable at scale and exposes usage metadata to the vendor. PDFluent is licensed per deployment. Process one document or ten million — the cost does not change.
The license is validated from a key file on startup. There is no recurring check against a remote validation server. If PDFluent is ever discontinued, the perpetual license clause in the Enterprise agreement lets you keep using the last released version.