About Keeply

Why I built a "version control" tool

Over the past two years, my company took on a public-works project where one employee was responsible for the CAD construction drawings. His files lived in the company shared folder, where he collaborated with 6-7 other people on the team. When he cleaned up his computer before leaving, he accidentally deleted one of those CAD drawings — and the paper copy of that drawing hadn’t been scanned and filed yet. No file history, no record of changes, no way back to the moment before he deleted it. That one drawing, we had to redraw from scratch.

Watching it happen, my first thought wasn’t "our security failed" or "whose fault is this." It was — we’re not stupid. This kind of software was simply never designed to remember who did what. NAS, shared folders, cloud drives — they’re built to let people sync and collaborate, not to let people trace back afterward. I thought: a construction site needs a file-management tool, but not the kind engineers use.

I don’t come from a programming background. I lean heavily on AI to write code, and along the way I came across a thing engineers use called git — it remembers "who changed what, and when." That was the moment I realized: engineers have used this capability for decades, but no one had ever brought it onto a construction site. So I started redesigning that capability into a version made for 6-7 non-engineers sharing one set of files. Keeply is that answer.

On the site I saw all of these situations — _v3_final.dwg followed by _v3_really_final.dwg, an old/ folder stuffed with 50 past versions, and the team chat asking every few days "who has last Thursday’s drawing?" From then on I kept wondering — what about other small office teams? Designers, lawyers, accounting firms — those places where 6-7 people share one set of files every day, are they doing the same thing? Faking file history by hand with naming conventions and folder structures. The problem isn’t that these teams don’t understand technology; it’s that this technology was never translated for the setting of "people who don’t write code needing to edit one set of files together."

Sometimes I wonder whether to build an enterprise edition. So far I haven’t seen concrete demand, and designing blindly without demand only produces something nobody wants. So I’ve chosen to wait — until enough enterprise users come tell me "you should add X," and then I’ll build it properly. When I see that signal, I’ll update this page.

Keeply’s 5 principles

Who are you handing your files to?

Keeply is made by one person. My name is Ting-Wei Tsao. Writing the code, designing the interface, answering support email, processing refunds, replying to your LinkedIn messages — I handle all of it myself. No outsourced support, no PR speaking on my behalf, no marketing team. You write in, and the person who replies is me.

I’m a licensed Professional Civil Engineer (I passed Taiwan’s national professional qualification examination), specializing in construction management, and I graduated from the Department of Construction Engineering at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. For the past two years I’ve worked at a construction company on public-works projects, so the file chaos a site team faces every day is something I’ve lived through.

The technical side is the fun part. I lean heavily on AI to write code, and at first I didn’t even know what GitHub was. One time I was overhauling a webapp I was building, AI went on a rampage and broke my stuff, and I wasn’t using git at the time. Luckily AI later reverse-engineered a fix back for me, and only then did I turn around and ask, "how do you solve this kind of thing at the root?" — that was the first time I learned about git.

I used to run VPS reselling for customers worldwide, with up to 1,600 customers using my service — so "handing software to strangers over the internet and keeping it running" is nothing new to me. That experience taught me one thing: customers don’t care how big your company is, they care whether you can solve their problem. Keeply being made by one person means there’s no product manager forcing me to add a dashboard, no marketing telling me to write "AI-powered," no support script standing between you and me. Your message comes straight to me. To me, the heart of building a business is helping people solve problems — and what Keeply solves is the daily file chaos that construction sites and small office teams face.

If Keeply disappears one day, will your data still be there?

Short answer: yes. Keeply’s file history lives on your machine and on every one of your teammates’ machines, not on our company’s servers. Even if the Keeply company folds tomorrow, our website goes dark, and the payment system stops — you open Finder (or Windows File Explorer), go into the Keeply folder, and those 200 versions are still right where they were. A team of 6-7 people means 6-7 independent backups.

The software license comes with an unconditional 30-day refund. The Team Plan monthly, the Team Plan annual, and the $599 early-access perpetual license all qualify — no reason needed, no form to fill out, just send me one email. See the full terms in the refund policy.

And if one day you decide to stop using Keeply and switch to another tool — you can take your data with you. File history is stored in open formats and can be read by third-party software. You won’t be locked into Keeply.