Turn private documents into
AI-ready Markdown

No. Your documents are converted entirely on your computer — including OCR — and are never uploaded. Milldown makes exactly three kinds of network request, none of which carry a file from your disk: fetching a web page or YouTube transcript you explicitly paste, checking milldown.app for updates (and fetching one when you approve it), and verifying your licence key with our licensing service. There's no account and no telemetry, and converting local files works with Wi-Fi off.

Two optional features are the exception, and they're clearly marked as such in Settings: Azure Document Intelligence and Azure Content Understanding send your document to your own Azure resource, configured with your own endpoint and credentials. Milldown neither provides nor proxies either service; the document leaves this computer for Microsoft's cloud under your Azure agreement. Both are off by default.

PDF (including scanned), Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), Excel (.xlsx/.xlsm), HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, RSS/Atom, EPUB, ZIP archives, Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb), Outlook messages (.msg), plain text and Markdown, and JPEG/PNG images — plus any web page, Wikipedia article or YouTube video by URL.

Legacy Office formats (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Apple formats (.pages, .key, .numbers) need saving as their modern equivalents first. Milldown tells you which one rather than failing silently.

Because the only transcription in the underlying engine uploads your audio to an anonymous shared speech API — no account, no key of your own, no terms between you and it. The two Azure features are opt-in precisely because they send documents to your own Azure resource, configured with your own endpoint; there's no equivalent way to do that for audio, so it's disabled rather than quietly shipped. YouTube transcripts are different — those are captions YouTube already published, fetched as text.

Locally, with OpenAI's o200k tokenizer as a consistent estimate (absolute counts vary by provider), comparing the Markdown against the realistic alternative for that file type. For PDFs that's native PDF upload, which bills every page as an image as well as text. For web pages it's the raw page source a scraper would ingest. For spreadsheets it's Milldown's CSV mode against its own Markdown-table output.

Some files show no saving. A Word document costs about the same in Markdown as the plain-text extraction any tool would do anyway — claiming 97% by comparing against the raw OOXML inside the file would be measuring against something nobody does. A video has no raw path at all: a transcript is the only way to give one to an LLM. In those cases Milldown shows the token count and explains why there's no comparison.

Yes, and for most people it's the version that matters. On a fixed plan — Claude Pro or Max, ChatGPT Plus, Copilot, Cursor — a smaller document doesn't reduce an invoice, it buys headroom: more documents before you hit a usage limit, longer conversations before the context window fills, and less of your allowance spent re-sending the same boilerplate on every turn.

The saving is always tokens — and the percentages apply the same way whether you're billed for those tokens or rationed on them.

It strips conversion noise without touching your content: repeated running headers and footers (short lines that appear four or more times, the signature of per-page boilerplate), standalone page numbers, trailing whitespace, invisible characters like zero-width and non-breaking spaces, and runs of blank lines collapsed to one. It never touches anything inside a fenced code block, it tells you how much it removed, and Revert Cleanup restores the original exactly.

Yes — that's exactly what it's for. Refine ▸ Export RAG Chunks splits on heading boundaries into numbered Markdown files at roughly 512, 1,024 or 2,048 tokens; Export Chunks as JSONL produces one JSON object per line for direct ingestion. Provenance front matter attaches the source path, timestamp and SHA-256 so every chunk stays traceable.

Both. Drop a folder and Milldown mirrors the entire tree, subfolders preserved. Watch folders go further: nominate a folder and anything added to it is converted automatically into a "Markdown" subfolder, so a Markdown mirror maintains itself.

Yes. Install the milldown command from the app menu and it works anywhere — scripts, Makefiles, CI — with full option parity. Or open a ready-made terminal from the app if you'd rather not install anything system-wide.The installer puts the milldown command on your PATH, and it works anywhere — scripts, Makefiles, CI. There's also a milldown:// URL scheme for Shortcuts and launchersscripts and launchers, which asks for confirmation so nothing converts behind your back.

Free for 7 days — every feature unlocked, no account needed. Then a $39 perpetual licence covering up to 3 Macs, for personal and commercial use. A $249 Team licence covers 10 seats. Prices exclude VAT/sales tax, which is added at checkout where applicable — Stripe, as merchant of record, handles the tax and issues your receipt.

Your purchase includes 12 months of updates. After that the app keeps working forever; renewing simply continues the new versions — $19/year for a personal licence, $99/year for a Team licence covering all 10 seats. Nothing is billed automatically, and no feature is ever switched off. There is a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and later) running macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. Intel Macs are not supported. The download is around 171 MB because the conversion engine is bundled inside the app — there's nothing else to install, and no Python on your system is touched or required.

Conversion stops; nothing else changes. Documents you've already converted stay in the app and on disk, and everything you saved is plain Markdown you own outright. Entering a license key resumes immediately.

Conversion is powered by Microsoft's open-source MarkItDown engine (MIT license), bundled inside the app, with Milldown's native macOS interface, on-device OCR via Apple's Vision framework, token analytics, and workflow tools built on top. Milldown is not affiliated with Microsoft.