mdstill.com

What It Is

mdstill is a bidirectional document and Markdown conversion tool. Its main focus is converting 18 formats—including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, EPUB, CSV, JSON, XML, Apple iWork, and ZIP—into clean GitHub-flavored Markdown. It also supports exporting Markdown back into 13 formats such as PDF, DOCX, HTML, EPUB, PPTX, and LaTeX. Its positioning is very clear: it is built for LLM prompts, RAG pipelines, knowledge bases, and developer documentation workflows.

Core Capabilities and Developer Experience

Its core value is not just “text extraction,” but preserving headings, tables, lists, code blocks, and document structure as much as possible. For RAG use cases, the API supports output=structured, returning sections, headings, chunks, heading_path, content_types, and token statistics, making it easy to feed directly into LangChain, LlamaIndex, or vector databases. The REST API is straightforward, with only POST /api/convert: a single endpoint covers both forward and reverse conversion. The documentation provides examples for cURL, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, Go, PHP, and Bash. There is no SDK, but the integration barrier is low.

Pricing and Limits

Pricing is currently fairly friendly. Anonymous users can perform 10 fast conversions per day without registration, with a maximum file size of 10MB. After free registration, users get 50 fast conversions and 10 deep conversions per day, with fast conversions supporting files up to 20MB; API access and 7-day history are also included. Pro has not launched yet, and pricing is still TBD. The page says it may be priced at under €10/month for a single seat, with higher quotas of 500 fast conversions per day, 50MB files, 1000-page PDFs, and priority support. This is enough for individuals and small teams to test, but large-scale batch migrations will still be constrained by quotas.

Pros and Cons

The strengths are broad format support, especially covering Office, PDF, EPUB, and Apple iWork; an extremely simple API; and structured output that closely matches real RAG needs. The privacy statement says files are processed in stateless workers and deleted immediately afterward. The downsides are that there is no visible information on open source availability, self-hosting, enterprise compliance, SLA, or payment methods. Pro has not officially launched, so business continuity and high-volume usage costs remain uncertain. There is also no official SDK, so complex projects will need to build their own wrappers.

Who It’s For and Access from China

mdstill is suitable for developers, researchers, and documentation teams that need to feed external documents into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, or build RAG knowledge bases. It is also useful for migrating legacy documents into Obsidian, Notion, Confluence, or GitHub Wiki. Access from mainland China is not mentioned in the available text, so it should be considered unknown. If network access or payment is restricted, alternatives such as Pandoc, MarkItDown, Unstructured, Apache Tika, CloudConvert, and ConvertAPI may be worth considering.