The Future Of Keep
I first built Keep years ago as a fun side project to learn iOS development and I never expected to publish it to the app store (I’m a mediocre developer at best). I enjoyed working on the app for a time but I’ve long since lost interest.
Keep loses money every month and the user base is small enough that my direct monthly costs exceed revenues. I’ve long debated shutting the app down; however, I could never quite bring myself to do it. I don’t like the idea of forcing people who do like the app to migrate all their bookmarks to something else.
I’m a product manager by day and while building Keep I’ve violated almost every known product management best practice. The app is a dog’s breaksfast of half built features that were just fun to tinker with. I did gather feedback from customers but I mainly worked on features that were interesting to build. That said, some things need to change…
In the next version of Keep, there will be some deprecations:
- Audio articles -> Of the app’s user base, almost nobody uses this and it’s not built particularly well (note, you will lose any saved audio files, so start exporting them now if you care about the audio files)
- Discover tab -> I haven’t updated the content for a good long time and can’t see myself starting up again. It was a pain.
- Smart tagging -> They really aren’t all that smart and nobody uses it
- Free tier -> It’s not going away but I need to gate previously free features behind the subscription. This will include tagging, pinning, and filtering by tags. This will likely annoy free users…sorry about that.
As far as positioning the app, I’m moving from:
‘Keep — Smart Bookmark Manager”
to..
“Keep — Simple Bookmark Manager”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The customers who love Keep seem to like it for its simplicity. No fancy reader options, just saving links with some organization capabilities through tagging, coloured tagging, pinning, title editing along with filtering and search. That’s it.
For those that will not be happy with these changes, apologies and thanks for sticking around as long as you did. If audio articles and content discovery is super important for you, Pocket is really good at both!. Tagging is also free with most other apps.
Privacy
I’ve always been intentional about not sending push notifications to users. Likely, to the detriment of the app’s success. I don’t like when other apps send me marketing push notifications and I never wanted to do that to Keep users. I’ve also maintained minimal use of analytics in the app. Just enough to see what features are being used (anonymized). I believe the content you save in a personal collection should be absolutely private and not used to feed some ad algorithm, build a profile, etc.
I’ll be taking it a step further and ripping out ALL analytics (save for crash reporting) and removing the push notification permissions request.
If you choose to continue to support Keep, you’ll be supporting a lesser featured app than what competitors offer, sorry (I’m Canadian so we apologize a lot).
How do I expect to earn more by offering less? I don’t really. Don’t get me wrong, it would be awesome if the app found a larger devoted audience of users who want to support indie app development, but I’ve long given up on that idea. I’m thinking about setting up a Discord community for users who want to discover new content or talk about what they’re reading and saving in Keep. We’ll see.
Going forward Keep will be about simple and private bookmarking…based on what the ‘big players’ are doing, this might actually be more valuable, not less!?
The price will stay the same. Crazy, I know. Offering less and charging the same!? With this streamlining, I’m hoping it might re-invogorate some of my enthusiasm for working on the app. Maintaining simplicity and privacy while carefully building out features that compromise neither.
For those free tier users who are going to be mad at me for gating additional features, there are lots and lots of good apps out there. I hope you might consider sticking around but if not; you’ll be fine. You can login to the web app and export your saved articles before moving on.
I hope to release an update in the coming days (weeks?).
Email me anytime. support@getkeep.app
