Scanfone › Features › Free PDF scanner
A free PDF scanner that stays free at the save button
"Free" scanner apps have a habit of becoming not-free right when you tap Save. Scanfone is free where it counts: scanning, saving, sharing, printing and text recognition.
How to scan a PDF for free on iPhone
- Download Scanfone from the App Store. There is no sign-up.
- Tap Scan and capture your pages with the iPhone camera.
- Tap Save. No paywall appears.
- Share, print or save the PDF to Files.
What "free" usually means in scanner apps
Search the App Store for a free scanner and you will find plenty of apps labelled free. Read their reviews and the same complaints come up across the category: a paywall at the save or export step, ads between scans, weekly plans and trials that turn into a charge, subscriptions that are hard to cancel, free tiers that shrink over time and watermarks stamped across your page.
None of that is illegal, and some of those apps are very good at scanning. But it makes "free" a bit of a magic trick: the scan is free, the file is not. We think the file is the point.
What is free in Scanfone
Everything you need to scan and use a document, with no limits, no ads and no account:
- Unlimited scanning with the iPhone camera, with edge detection and perspective fix
- Multi-page PDFs, plus importing photos and PDFs
- Filters, rotate, reorder and delete pages
- Text recognition (OCR): searchable PDFs and copyable text
- Search across all documents, including their text
- Folders, share, print and save to Files
- ID card, passport and QR code scan modes
- Sign, add text, watermark, page numbers, footer text and redact
- Merge, split and compress PDFs
- Convert PDF to JPG, PDF to text and photos to PDF
- The Safe: a folder locked with a PIN and Face ID
So how is this free?
Fair question. Scanfone makes money from Scanfone Pro, an optional yearly subscription for people who want more than one phone in the picture. Pro adds sync between your phones, a 1 TB cloud backup on EU servers, Word and PowerPoint export, and removes the small footer line. It costs $2.99 for the first year, then $19.99 a year. That is the whole business model. We do not show ads and we do not use tracking or analytics, so there is no data side-hustle either.
Because the free version runs on your phone (scanning and OCR happen on the device), it does not cost us server money to let you scan as much as you like. That is why free can stay free.
The one honest catch
Free PDFs get a single small line under each page: "Scanned free with Scanfone". It sits below the content, not across it, so your document stays readable and usable. If you need clean pages for a client or a formal submission, Pro removes the line. Compare plans on the pricing page.
Free and private
Nothing you scan is uploaded unless you turn on Pro sync. There is no account to create, so there is no email address to hand over either. For anything extra sensitive, use the safe locked folder.
How it compares
If you are weighing up options, our best free scanner app page lays out what different apps include for free, and there are fair, fact-based comparisons such as CamScanner alternative, Adobe Scan alternative and Notes scanner vs Scanfone.
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