About GIF Den

GIF Den is built and run by RTFM, an indie software studio in South Korea, with one design rule that everything else follows from: your files never leave your device — verifiably.

Why it exists

In March 2025, the FBI warned that fake online file converters were being used to spread malware and harvest the files people uploaded. That warning landed because of how the whole category works: you hand a stranger's server a perfect copy of your screen recording — tokens, messages, customer data and all — and hope for the best.

But browsers stopped needing the server years ago. Modern browsers ship hardware video decoders (WebCodecs), so the conversion can happen right where the file already is: on your machine. GIF Den is that idea, built properly — with the receipts to prove it.

How it's funded

No investors, no data sales, no ads on tool pages. The free tier is complete and watermark-free. Power users buy a one-time $12 Pro upgrade for batch conversion, presets, and unlimited output — that's the entire business model.

The stack, briefly

Static site (Astro) on Cloudflare. Conversion runs in a web worker: WebCodecs hardware decoding with a WebAssembly fallback for rare codecs, GIF encoding in JavaScript, and gifsicle (WASM) for compression. The conversion engine is open source (MIT).

Contact

Questions, bugs, feature requests: rtfm.txt@gmail.com or the contact page. We actually read it.