PDFs are the worst category to upload casually
Think about what is actually in the PDFs people merge and split. Signed contracts. Bank statements being combined for a mortgage application. Medical records. A passport scan and a utility bill being joined into one file for a verification form. Tax documents. Legal disclosure bundles.
This is the single most sensitive class of file that ordinary people routinely hand to a free web tool, usually while under time pressure to complete some form. A tool that never receives the document removes that decision entirely rather than asking you to trust a retention policy.
What in-browser costs you
Being honest about the trade: page-level operations - merging, splitting, reordering, rotating, deleting pages - work well in a browser because they rearrange the document structure without re-encoding the content.
Operations that need to understand the content do not. Optical character recognition on a scanned page, converting a PDF into an editable Word document, or aggressively recompressing embedded images are genuinely heavy, and a server does them better. Softland does not pretend to offer those.
No metering, because there is nothing to meter
Free online PDF tools are typically limited by tasks per day or per hour, which is a rational way to price a service where every operation costs the provider CPU time and bandwidth.
Splitting a document in your own browser costs the provider nothing, so there is no allowance, no countdown, and no prompt to upgrade halfway through a job. You can merge forty documents in a row on a Sunday afternoon and nothing will stop you.