A small tool that tries to add nothing
pvdownloader is a small, independent desktop application for saving media from the web. It is free, it has no ads, and it does not want anything from you — no account, no email address, no telemetry.
Why is it free?
Because it costs almost nothing to run. There is no server doing the work — the application runs entirely on your computer, and the downloads travel straight from the platform to your disk. There is nothing to scale, no bandwidth bill, and no infrastructure to pay for.
The complete list of ongoing costs is: one domain name, paid once a year out of the developer’s own pocket. The website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers, which is free at this scale. The application has no backend at all.
- Domain registration — paid annually by the developer
- Hosting — free tier on Cloudflare Workers
- Servers — none. There is no backend to run.
- Bandwidth — none. Downloads never pass through us.
Why is it closed-source?
Being honest about this seems better than quietly implying otherwise: pvdownloader is proprietary software, not open source. The reasoning is simply that it is a personal project the author chose to share, without taking on the obligations that publishing source code brings — reviewing contributions, maintaining a public issue tracker, and answering to a community over a codebase he works on when he feels like it.
What that does not change is your data. Closed-source does not mean it phones home, and you can verify that yourself: the application makes no unsolicited network requests, and the only connections it opens are the ones described on the Privacy page. It also builds on open-source work, which is credited on the License page.
The free licence covers personal, non-commercial use. If you want to use it at work, get in touch.
What it deliberately does not do
Most of the frustration with downloader tools comes from things they add rather than things they do. pvdownloader tries to add nothing.
- No account, no sign-up, no email address required
- No ads, no sponsored placements, no affiliate links
- No telemetry, analytics, crash reporting or device identifiers
- No bundled toolbars or installers-within-installers
- No browser extensions, no hijacked search engines
- No watermark on anything you download
- No queue server, no proxy, no middleman
How it is built
The interface is built with Avalonia UI, which gives the same native application on Windows, macOS and Linux from a single codebase. Installation and background updates are handled by Velopack.
Extraction relies on yt-dlp, and conversion or audio extraction on FFmpeg. Neither is bundled: the application works without them, asks before downloading anything, and happily uses copies you already have installed. That keeps the installer small and means you are never shipped a component you did not ask for.
Supporting the project
There is nothing to buy and no paid tier. If the application saves you time and you want to chip in towards the domain renewal, there is a donation page — but it is genuinely optional, and using pvdownloader without ever donating is completely fine.
The other thing that helps just as much, and costs nothing, is telling someone about it or reporting a bug properly.
PVDownloader · pvdownloader.com