About

Made by Makki, an independent Mac developer

By Makki · Updated October 22, 2026

I'm Makki. I build Fileknife on my own, and I use it every day on the same kind of Mac you'd run it on.

It started with a ten-minute hassle everyone has: a video too big for WhatsApp, a folder of iPhone HEIC photos a friend couldn't open, three PDFs that needed to be one. Each time I'd land on some website, upload files to a server I'd never heard of, wait in a queue, then dodge a "sign up to download" wall. For files that never needed to leave my Mac.

So Fileknife has one rule: the work happens on your Mac. You drop a file, it shows you the tools that fit, you press one button. No Terminal, no Homebrew, no subscription.

How I test the tools

Every tool here I run on real files, on my own Macs, before it ships: an Apple-silicon MacBook and an older Intel one, on macOS 14, 15 and the current release. When a tool page says a 104 MB clip came out at 15.2 MB, that's a file I compressed, not a round number I made up. When a page shows a screenshot, it's the real app doing the real job.

Where macOS already does the job for free, I say so and show that way first: Preview for merging PDFs, QuickTime for a quick trim, Finder's Quick Actions for converting an image. The tool page then explains when Fileknife is worth it and when it isn't. I'd rather you trust the site than oversell it.

On-device by design

Fileknife uses Apple's own media and speech frameworks to do the heavy lifting locally. Subtitles and OCR use Apple's on-device speech and text recognition, so your audio and documents stay with you. The only time it touches the network is to check your license, look for updates, and download a small speech model once for Subtitles on macOS 14 and 15. That's the whole list, and the privacy page spells out the exact details.

Say hello

Found a bug, want a tool, or think a comparison here is unfair? Email me at [email protected]. It comes straight to me.