Keep started because my partner Jenny and I couldn't find a finance tool that worked the way our household actually works. Personal accounts, a joint account, money flowing between them every month. It seemed like a simple enough setup, but nothing handled it gracefully.
As we built Keep, though, something became clear: our household is just one shape. And the word "household" means something different for every family.
What is a household?
It's tempting to think of a household as a physical place — a house, with people in it. But financially, a household is something more fluid than that. It's the group of people whose money is meaningfully connected. And that group doesn't always match who lives under the same roof.
A single parent managing everything alone — that's a household. A blended family where some costs are shared across two homes — that's a household, maybe two overlapping ones. A couple who don't live together yet but are starting to share finances — that's a household forming. Adult children supporting an elderly parent — that's a household too, even if nobody involved would call it that.
A household is a financial boundary, not a postal address. And that boundary is unique to every family.
Families evolve
The other thing about households is that they change. Children are born. Partners move in. Relationships end and new ones begin. Kids leave home and sometimes come back. Parents need care. People move countries.
A finance tool that assumes a fixed household structure will break every time life changes. And life always changes. Keep is designed to be reconfigured as your family evolves — accounts added and removed, boundaries redrawn, new patterns recognised.
Your financial picture in January might look completely different from your financial picture in December. That's not a problem to solve. That's life happening.
No assumptions about shape
Keep doesn't start with a template of what a household should look like. It starts with accounts — yours, however many, in whatever combination makes sense for your family. You decide which accounts form the boundary. You decide what's "inside" (household money) and what's "outside" (money coming in or going out).
That means Keep works for a single person with three accounts just as well as it works for a family of five with a dozen accounts across multiple banks. The core logic is the same: understand what crosses the boundary and what moves within it.
Built by someone who uses it
I'm a UX designer by profession, and I build Keep alongside my full-time work — evenings and weekends. It's not backed by venture capital. It's not trying to become the next unicorn. It's a careful piece of software built by one person for households like his own.
That shapes the decisions I make. I don't need to monetise your data to make the economics work. I don't need to add features that create dependency. I don't need push notifications that bring you back when you don't need to be there. I just need to build something useful enough that it's worth £49.
When time is limited, every decision has to count. There's no room for features that don't pull their weight. Everything in Keep is there because it genuinely helps you understand your finances.
For your household
I don't know what your household looks like. I don't know if you're a couple, a single parent, a blended family, or someone just starting to figure out their financial life on their own. I don't know if your situation is simple or complicated, settled or changing.
But I know that your household is yours, that it has its own shape and rhythm, and that you deserve a tool that respects that rather than forcing you into someone else's template.
That's what Keep is for. Not for a type of household. For yours.