Every so often I need to edit a PDF I get from another source, and then I go on this needless and mostly-fruitless endeavor to find a place on the internet to make those edits ⸺ forgetting that I already know of and have a place to do it.
In this case I wanted to combine two PDFs into one, and that's something your browser can't handle. These days you can use your browser to add text and images, fill out forms, and stuff like that, but actual editing of the contents still isn't possible. (At least it's not in Firefox; for all I know Google ponied up the cash to Adobe to allow for full manipulation of their proprietary format within Chrome.) There are a million sites that offer various PDF-editing capabilities, but whomst can you really trust these days? If a service is free then the provider is either going to upsell you or they're gonna save and sell your data ⸺ or both!
I ended up on adobe.com for this task, and once Adobe had me in the system and I'd successfully combined two PDFs into one, they refused to let me do anything else unless I started a free trial for their $20/month "premium" PDF-editing system. I've heard too many horror stories about Adobe subscriptions and cancellation fees to fall for that, so I went back to my search.
One of the results mentioned LibreOffice, and that's when I had an "oh yeah" moment. It's one of those bits of software I don't use often enough to remember it exists and is in fact already installed on my current PC. It's also one of the few free and open-source projects that has a not-free enterprise version and therefore actually stays up to date. Sure enough, I was able to disembiggen the giant shipping label I'd been sent from "taking up the full page" in size to something more reasonable. No drama, no subscription upsells, and no data sold off to some corporation with lazy data-handling policies that ultimately results in a class-action suit netting me $25 for the nth time in my life.
Anyway, I then sent that PDF, now combined and resized, off to a nearby pharmacy for printing, for a massive sum of 84 cents, because who even owns a printer anymore when the ink costs more per weight than gold. I don't know if that's actually true, but I doubt it's far off if it's not.