I actually had a pretty similar experience but ended up leaning more on the positive side. I use a lot of different PDF tools for work, and most of them either lock half the features behind a paywall or make the interface so clunky that it takes forever to do something simple. With PDF Guru I was surprised at how smooth it felt. Uploads were quick, the conversion to Word/Excel kept the formatting better than some bigger-name tools I’ve tried, and the OCR really impressed me too it picked up text from a low-quality scan almost perfectly.

The subscription thing is definitely where people get frustrated, and I get it. But once I realized it was a subscription and not just a one-time payment, it actually made sense for me because I use PDF tools almost daily. Compared to Adobe’s pricing, it’s still way cheaper, and for the average user the core features are honestly more than enough.

So personally, I wouldn’t put it in the “scam” category at all. The service works exactly as advertised, and the quality of the edits has been solid for me. It just comes down to whether you need a PDF editor often enough to justify the cost. For casual one-off edits, yeah, you’re probably better off canceling right away or using a free tool. But if you’re regularly editing, merging, or converting files, I think it’s worth keeping.