A tracked PDF link cannot tell you whether anyone understood what they read, and it stops seeing anything the moment a file is downloaded. What it can report is the part that is observable, and report honestly: which pages were opened, for how long, and how far into the document each reader got — with automated opens from corporate mail scanners and link previewers classified and excluded from the counts rather than inflating them.
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500MB free storage • No credit card required • Full analytics included
Upload and track multiple PDFs with 500MB of free storage space. No hidden fees.
Start tracking PDFs immediately without providing any payment information. Our free plan is truly free.
Get comprehensive analytics including view counts, engagement time, geographic data, and page-by-page insights.
Capture viewer email addresses before they access your documents. Perfect for lead generation and building your audience.
Secure your PDFs with password protection. Control who can access your documents and when.
Every uploaded PDF is automatically scanned for viruses and malware to keep your documents safe.
Set custom expiration dates for your document links. Perfect for time-sensitive content.
Upload any PDF document to PDFTrackr. Our platform automatically scans for viruses and prepares it for secure sharing.
Get a secure link to share your PDF. Add password protection, email capture, or set expiration dates as needed.
Monitor views, engagement, and analytics in real-time. See who's reading your documents and how they interact with them.
| Feature | PDFTrackr Free |
|---|---|
| Bot / scanner filtering | Included — automated opens from corporate mail scanners and link previewers are excluded from view counts |
| Analytics Retention | 12 months on the free plan, and every view is kept |
| Free Storage | 500MB |
| Credit Card Required | No |
| Email Capture | Included |
| Password Protection | Included |
| Virus Scanning | Included |
| Analytics Dashboard | Full Access |
| GDPR Compliance | Built-in |
| Page-by-Page Analytics | Included |
| Tool | Analytics history kept on the free plan |
|---|---|
| PDFTrackr | 12 months on the free plan, and every view is kept |
| Papermark | 30 days |
| Peony | 30 days |
| TrackPDF | 3 days |
| HummingDeck | Real-time only — no history kept |
Retention is one half of whether a view count is worth anything. The other half is whether the views were people at all: corporate mail security scanners and link previewers open tracked links before any human does, and in our own unfiltered production data roughly one recorded view in seven had no page engagement at all. PDFTrackr classifies those automated opens and excludes them from your counts, on the free plan as well as on Pro. Most tools in this category do not publish whether they do anything of the kind — we scored seven free plans on it in the best free PDF tracking tools.
Retention is not the only axis, and these are the ones where those tools beat us. Papermark's free plan takes PDF, Notion pages, images and spreadsheets, where PDFTrackr takes PDFs and nothing else. Peony's free plan sends a real-time open alert — included on every tier, Free first — and includes 3 e-signatures per month, free, where a PDFTrackr free sender gets a daily email digest of opens instead, and there is no e-signature on any PDFTrackr plan because we are not building one.
Two caveats worth reading before you trust any of these numbers. First, a raw view count is an upper bound rather than a headcount — corporate mail scanners and link previewers open documents too, and we measured how much of a typical count that is in are your PDF view counts real. Second, the method you pick decides what you can answer at all: attachments and read receipts cannot report pages, which we work through in how to know who opened your PDF. If the mechanism itself is the open question, what PDF tracking is defines it and sets out what it cannot see, and the PDF tracking pixel page covers the one mechanism people ask about by name. For what the numbers look like once you have them, we measured how long people spend reading a PDF across our own corpus. If you would rather compare the free plans on offer before committing, we tested eighteen of them in the best free PDF tracking tools. And where the choice is already down to one rival, the head-to-head pages take a single product at a time: PDFTrackr vs Papermark, PDFTrackr vs Peony, PDFTrackr vs HummingDeck and PDFTrackr vs Sizle.
Track engagement with quarterly reports, proposals, and presentations
Monitor student engagement with course materials and study guides
Capture emails and track engagement with marketing materials
Protect sensitive documents with password protection and access controls
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Free is the product here, not a trial of it. Page-by-page reading, the email gate, password protection, link expiry, the download switch, virus scanning on every upload and twelve months of history all sit on the free plan, and none of them expire, degrade or get withdrawn later. Most people never need anything beyond it, and that is the intended outcome rather than a gap in the plan.
Pro at $9 a month is about volume and timing, not about depth of measurement. The first thing people run out of is room: one link per recipient means the fifty-link ceiling is usually what you reach first, and Pro lifts it to unlimited active share links, 500 documents, 10GB of storage and 250MB per file. Bulk personalised links then create a separate tracked link for every name on a list in one pass, which is the difference between fifty links made by hand and fifty made in a minute — and it is what turns "someone opened it" into knowing which named recipient read how far.
The second is the second visit. Pro sends a return-visit alert, so on an email-gated link a client rereading page six of last week's proposal reaches you as a signal on the day rather than as a row you notice later. The third is history: twelve months becomes twenty-four, on the same data, which is what a renewal conversation eighteen months after you sent the file actually needs.
So: if you send a document or two at a time, stay on free — it is not a reduced version of this product. Upgrade to Pro when you are deleting old links to make room for new ones, when a list of recipients has grown past the point where making links by hand is sensible, or when knowing that a reader came back to an email-gated link matters the day it happens. Both prices and the full limits for each plan are on the pricing page.
Yes. PDFTrackr classifies automated opens — corporate mail security scanners and link previewers that fetch a tracked link before any person does — and excludes them from your view counts. That runs on the free plan, not only on Pro, and it is not a paid add-on. In our own unfiltered production data, roughly one recorded view in seven had no page engagement at all, which is the share by which a raw view count can overstate a readership.
PDFTrackr keeps 12 months of analytics history on the free plan, and every view is kept rather than only the most recent ones. Pro extends the same data to 24 months. Nothing about the measurement is held back on free: per-page reading time, the drop-off curve, the furthest page each reader reached, and the exclusion of automated opens are all included.
Yes! PDFTrackr offers a generous free plan with 500MB storage, full analytics, email capture, and security features. No credit card required to get started.
There's no catch. We believe in providing value first. Our free plan includes everything you need to start tracking PDFs effectively.
The free plan is available indefinitely. You can use it as long as you want with no time restrictions or hidden fees.
You can delete old files to free up space.
Yes! You can upload and track up to 50 PDFs on the free plan, within your 500MB storage limit. Each document gets its own tracking link and analytics dashboard.
Yes! All plans, including the free plan, include virus scanning, secure HTTPS connections, GDPR compliance, and data encryption. Your documents and analytics data are fully protected.
Every method compared — read receipts, cloud storage, DRM, and tracked links — with the honest limits of each.
Read Guide →Complete step-by-step guide to PDF tracking setup and implementation.
Read Guide →Learn best practices for secure document sharing and access control.
Read Guide →Master document insights and performance tracking with comprehensive analytics.
Read Tutorial →Get answers to common questions about PDF tracking and document analytics.
Read FAQ →Start tracking your PDFs for free with PDFTrackr. No credit card required.
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