I Built a Free CV Builder With No Login, and Your Resume Never Leaves Your Browser

Introduction

You know the moment. You spend an hour on some resume builder, fixing your bullet points, picking a nice template. Then you click Download, and it says: "Upgrade to Pro to export your PDF."

Or it lets you download, but the PDF has their logo on the bottom. Or it wants your email first.

I got tired of that. So I built the one I wanted, and I called it Lanjut.

When I first wrote about it in July, it had six templates. On October 29 it hit 1.0, with a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Today it's on 1.6, with twenty templates. And the three rules from day one are still the same:

In short:

No login. No sign-up, no email, no password. Open it and write.

Free, and open source. No paid plan, no trial, no watermark. The code is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0.

Your resume stays on your device. It's saved in your browser. There's no server that stores it.

Try it at lanjut.org.

By the way, Lanjut means "continue" in Indonesian. Which is also what "resume" means. I'm still a little proud of that one 😅

Rule 1: No Login

Q: Do I need an account?
A: No. Go to lanjut.org/editor and start typing.

Think about who needs a resume builder the most. Someone who's looking for a job. A fresh graduate, or someone who just got laid off last week. They don't need one more account, one more "verify your email", one more newsletter.

So Lanjut has no accounts at all. Not "optional sign-up". None.

Rule 2: Free, and Open Source

No paid plan. No trial that ends after seven days. No watermark on your PDF. Download as many times as you want, in PDF, Word (.docx), or plain text.

How can it be free? Because it costs me almost nothing to run. There's no database and no user accounts to keep. Cloudflare serves the site, and your browser does the rest. When the server bill is close to zero, a paywall would just be greed.

And it's open source under AGPL-3.0. So you don't have to trust anything I write in this post. You can read the code.

Rule 3: Your Resume Stays on Your Device

This is the one I care about the most.

A resume has your phone number (some country requires it), your email, your city, and your whole work history. Most resume builders keep all of that in their database. Lanjut is local-first: everything you write is saved in your browser's own storage (IndexedDB), on your machine.

Since you're reading this on dev.to, here's a fun test. Open DevTools, go to the Network tab, and type in the editor for a minute. Your resume doesn't go anywhere. There's nothing to send it to.

There's also a privacy page that lists every single time the site talks to a server, like loading the page or checking for a desktop update. It's a short list.

Q: So what happens if I switch laptops?
A: You download a backup. One small file holds a profile and all its resumes, and you open it on the other machine. That file goes wherever you send it. Not to me.

Does It Actually Pass the ATS?

Quick context: an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is the software many companies use to read your resume before a human does. It copies the text out of your PDF and sorts it into fields. If your layout confuses it, your job titles end up mixed with your hobbies, and nobody ever tells you.

I'll be honest: no tool can promise you get through. Every company sets up its ATS differently. What Lanjut can do is make sure the file is right: real text, standard headings, and one reading order from top to bottom. That's why it has no tables and no two-column layouts. You still choose the fonts, spacing, colors, and section order.

And instead of asking you to believe that, the home page shows it:

On the left is the page a recruiter sees. On the right is the text pulled out of a real PDF, generated right there in your browser. Drag the handle to compare. If the right side reads in a clean order, so will most parsers.

What's in 1.6

The 1.6 release was a big one:

Fourteen new templates, so twenty in total. Every one keeps the same reading order. Only the look changes.
Colors for your name, headings, lines, and links. Lanjut refuses a color that's too light to read on white.
Contact labels, so you can show "LinkedIn" instead of a long URL. It also warns you, because some ATS only read the visible text.
A download page that picks the right installer for your computer.

And a few things that were already there, but people keep asking me about:

Profiles. Keep one profile per kind of job, like one for frontend roles and one for product roles. Each has its own resumes and contact details.
Import your old CV. Drop in a PDF, and Lanjut sorts it into sections.
Works offline. Open it once, and it keeps working without a connection. The desktop app works offline too.
English and Indonesian, for the app and for the resume itself.

For Developers

Okay, this is my favorite part. Open Preferences and turn on Developer mode. Now the editor has a Form/Code switch, and you can write your whole resume as Markdown, YAML, or JSON. The page updates as you type.

I mean, we write README files all day. Why not a resume?

The stack, if you're curious: Astro with React islands for the site, zustand for state, synced to IndexedDB. The PDF export runs in a Web Worker through WebAssembly, so even a big export never freezes the page. The desktop app is Tauri, loading the same static build from disk. I wrote about the architecture in more detail on my site.

Closing

Lanjut is v1 now. For me, that means the promise is locked: no login, free, open source, and your resume stays on your device. New features will keep coming, but those four won't change. If a feature ever needs an account or a server copy of your resume, it won't ship.

So if you're job hunting, or you know someone who is, give it a try: