Your financial data is one of the most revealing things about you. It shows where you shop, what you earn, who you send money to, what you spend on healthcare, how often you eat out, and whether you bought flowers for your partner last Tuesday.
It's intimate in a way that people don't always think about until they do. And we think it deserves to be treated that way.
A design decision, not a limitation
Keep stores everything in a database on your computer. Your transactions, accounts, transfers, rules, and settings all live locally. When you close Keep, your data stays right where it is — on your device, accessible only to you.
We didn't build it this way because we couldn't figure out cloud storage. We built it this way because we believe your financial data shouldn't leave your device unless you explicitly choose to send it somewhere. It's a decision we made early on, and it shapes everything about how Keep works.
What this means in practice
It means Keep works without internet. On a plane, in a coffee shop, with your Wi-Fi off — your finances are always available because they're always local.
It means there's no account to create and no password to remember (beyond your device login). You download Keep, import your data, and you're working.
It means if Keep the company disappeared tomorrow, your data would still be on your computer, in a standard format, completely yours. We don't hold your data hostage. We have to earn your continued use by being genuinely useful.
What about sync?
Local-first doesn't mean single-device. If you want to use Keep on your laptop and your desktop, optional encrypted sync keeps them in step. The key word is optional — and the encryption means even the sync process doesn't expose your data to us.
We're also building bank feed integration so you can import transactions automatically. But the connection goes from your bank to your device. We facilitate it — we don't sit in the middle reading your statements.
An honest trade-off
There's something worth acknowledging here. Cloud storage creates a kind of dependency — if your data is on someone else's server, you need their service to access it. That's a powerful way to keep customers. Keep doesn't have that.
If you stop using Keep, your data is still yours. You can export it, move it, do whatever you like with it. That means we have to earn your continued use by being the best tool for the job — not by making it hard to leave.
We think that's how software should work.
The simple version
We can't lose your data because we never had it. We can't sell your data because we've never seen it. We can't be breached in a way that exposes your finances because they were never on our servers.
That's not a privacy policy. That's just how Keep is built.