Why I Built Riqa?

It started in an airport

Last year I was travelling internationally and needed to merge documents for a visa application. In transit, I reached for an online PDF tool — the kind that comes up first in search results and looks professional enough to trust with important files.

It offered what looked like a one-time payment of $1.49 USD. I paid and got my documents merged.

A week later, $76 AUD appeared on my bank statement. It was only then that I went back and found the fine print: the $1.49 wasn't a one-time charge. It was a trial. After seven days, it rolled into a monthly subscription — the equivalent of $50 USD a month — with nothing that made that obvious at the point of payment.

Somewhere on that trip, still annoyed, I opened my laptop and built a merge prototype.

The real problem

That experience wasn't an isolated bad actor. It was a symptom of how PDF tools are built and priced.

Free tools come with file size caps, watermarks, and a quiet anxiety about where your documents are actually going — particularly when those documents are financial records, contracts, or visa applications. You're not the customer; you're the product.

Subscription tools like iLovePDF price for the power user who needs every feature every week. If you only need to compress a document before sending it, or merge files once a fortnight, you're paying for a suite of operations you'll never touch. The cheapest plan still assumes a level of regular use that most people don't have.

Desktop apps are either dated, complex, or expensive upfront — and they don't travel well.

What I wanted was simple: a clean tool I could reach for when I needed it, pay for what I actually used, and trust with professional documents. It didn't exist, so I spent the next few months building it properly — polishing the merge prototype, adding more operations, and designing the pricing model from scratch.

Pay when you get value

Subscriptions made sense when software was expensive to distribute. That logic holds less weight now, when the marginal cost of serving one more user is close to zero.

Pay-per-use is more honest. You pay when you get value — not on a monthly schedule regardless of whether you opened the app. Credits on Riqa don't expire. Buy them when you need them, use them when you need them, and forget about them in between.

It's the model I wanted as a user. So it's the one I built.

The name

Riqa (رقعة) is an Arabic calligraphic script known for its clarity and practicality. Historically it was the script of everyday writing: correspondence, records, working documents. Not decorative, not ceremonial — precise, functional, built for things that actually need to get done.

That felt right.