Press Kit

Keepance is a local-first desktop AI workspace where every chat (with Claude, GPT, Gemini, or local Ollama) becomes a real file on your hard drive.

Keepance is a local-first desktop AI workspace built for indie founders, useful for anyone who works with AI on real projects. Every chat with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or local Ollama models becomes a real Markdown file in a folder on your hard drive, not a proprietary database, not someone else's cloud. As of v2.0 the AI also reads images and PDFs you drop into chat, indexes your PDF library for retrieval the same way it indexes your notes, and reads replies out loud through a local Piper sidecar. A sandboxed plugin marketplace ships with four working day-one plugins; a community templates marketplace ships with six. Try it in a browser at keepance.com/try, in English, Spanish, or German. Bring your own API key. Pay once. Built on Tauri.

Keepance is a desktop AI workspace built for the way indie founders actually work. The pitch is simple: every conversation you have with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or a local Ollama model produces a real Markdown file in a real folder on your hard drive, in plain text that works in any other tool the day Keepance stops existing. There's no cloud database, no account required, and no Keepance server in the path between your machine and the AI provider, you bring your own API key, and your data never leaves your computer.

The v2.0 release (May 2026) lets the AI read what's actually in front of you. Drop an image or a PDF into chat and the AI sees it; Claude and Opus get PDFs natively, other providers get text-extracted versions via PDF.js. Flip "Include PDFs in workspace index" on in Settings and your PDF library becomes searchable AI context, with embeddings via fastembed-rs and MultilingualE5Small, all on-device. Long conversations get a [Compress] button that routes a summarization call through the fast model for your provider. Click the speaker icon on any AI message and a local Piper sidecar reads it out loud, no cloud, no API call.

v2.0 also ships a sandboxed plugin marketplace (Web Worker runtime, six declared permissions, plain-language consent dialog before install, four day-one plugins: Word Counter, Translator, Pomodoro, Mermaid Preview), a community templates marketplace pointing at a real GitHub repo, a browser demo at keepance.com/try with no signup required, and full UI translation into Spanish and German on top of English. v1.5 already shipped local RAG over your Markdown notes, an MCP server that exposes your workspace to Claude Desktop and Cursor, side-by-side AI editing with per-hunk accept and reject, voice input, and Ollama as a fourth provider; all of that is intact in v2.0.

Keepance is built by Jameson Daines, a Senior Product Designer at a health-tech company who spent eighteen months building it on weekends and evenings. The technology stack is Tauri 2 (Rust + WebView), React 18 + TypeScript, Zustand for state management, CodeMirror 6 for the editor, LanceDB for the local vector store, Piper for TTS. The source is visible at github.com/keepance/keepance. Mac (signed + notarized), Windows (Azure-signed), Linux (.deb / .rpm / .AppImage). Pricing is one-time: $49 Pro, $99 Lifetime, with the first 100 launch buyers paying $29 for the Lifetime tier. Sold via LemonSqueezy.

Jameson Daines is a Senior Product Designer with eight years in health-tech, building Keepance on weekends from his home in the US.

Jameson Daines is a Senior Product Designer at a US health-tech company, with eight years of experience designing healthcare and wearable products at Samsung, AstraZeneca, and Tesla. He builds Keepance on weekends and evenings, alongside BehaviorUX (a behavior change canvas tool) and Healthful (an AI design copilot for healthcare designers). His personal site is jamesondaines.com.

Jameson Daines is a Senior Product Designer with eight years of experience designing healthcare products and wearables for companies like Samsung, AstraZeneca, and Tesla. He holds a degree from University College London and currently works as a Senior Product Designer at a US-based telehealth company.

Outside his day job, Jameson runs several side projects under his personal brand: jamesondaines.com (his portfolio), BehaviorUX (a public knowledge base and canvas tool for behavior-centered product design), Healthful (an AI design copilot for healthcare designers), and Heardify (a student mental health resource).

Keepance is the largest of Jameson's side projects, eighteen months of evening and weekend work that grew from a personal experiment into a paid commercial product. He builds it because he uses it daily for his own founder work, and because he believes the indie founder use case for AI tools is structurally underserved by cloud-first incumbents.

He can be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

"The breaking point for me was when I'd been having a 2-hour conversation with Claude about pricing strategy, and a week later I couldn't find it. The friction was the copy-paste between the chat history and the actual document. Keepance puts them on the same screen, with the file as the source of truth."

"Local-first apps die on subscriptions. Obsidian, Sublime Text, BBEdit, Things, every successful local-first tool I can think of is one-time pricing because customers hate paying monthly for software with no server. I'd rather earn one $49 sale and a customer who tells their friends than rent the same person for $5 a month and dunning-loop their card every January."

"BYOK isn't a limitation, it's the privacy story. Some users will hate the API key setup hurdle, that's fine, they're not who I'm building for. The people I'm building for already have an Anthropic account and care that their business plan isn't sitting in someone else's cloud."

"I've shipped Keepance in the same model BehaviorUX runs on: 5 to 10 hours a week alongside a full-time job. The 8-week launch ramp wasn't 8 weeks of full-time work, it was 8 weeks of consistent evening and weekend pushes, with a Claude session as my de facto co-founder for the operational work."