Free RAG converter: what free should actually include
A free RAG converter is a page that turns your documents into searchable passages in the browser, with no account and no upload - if 'free' still means sending the file to a server, you are paying with the document.
Free is only useful if the file stays put
Most things called a free RAG converter are a signup wall in front of a hosted parser. The conversion is free in dollars and expensive in the only currency the documents have: they leave your machine. A converter that runs as WebAssembly in the tab is free in both senses. RAG Converter's browser tier is that shape - drop a file or a folder, download JSONL, nothing is uploaded and nobody asks for an email.
What you should get without paying
The same artifact a paid API would hand a script: overlapping chunks with an id, the passage text, a vector and enough metadata to cite the source file. Plus a manifest that says which files converted, which were skipped and why. A free tool that gives you a zip of Markdown and no vectors is a text extractor wearing a RAG label. The conversion is the chunks and the embeddings, not the pretty intermediate file.
What free cannot honestly promise
A tab cannot demux a long video, and wasm32's address space will not hold the largest vision models. Those jobs need a machine with more room, which is what a paid API is for. A free RAG converter that pretends otherwise will either upload the file after all or produce an empty result it does not explain. The honest split is documents and images in the browser, speech and video on a server you chose.
How to tell you are on a real one
Open the network panel and convert a file. If a request leaves for anywhere that is not your own origin or a model weight you opted into, it is not converting locally. If the download is JSONL with one object per chunk, and a skipped scan is listed rather than indexed as blank, you have the real thing. That is the test; the marketing page is not.