About MadeKeeper

What is actually running

The first line of MadeKeeper was written on July 29, 2026. It started taking subscriptions on August 8. The part that holds a booth sale on your phone when the signal quits went in on August 12. So this is a young thing, and the honest way to handle that is to say it rather than write around it.

Materials and true cost per piece, batch makes with your hours amortized across them, the price coach, sales that drain stock, per-event fair profit, lot tracking, consignment, mileage, expenses and the Schedule C packet are in the app today, and so is the whole booth side of it. Shipping labels, email to your past buyers and Canadian tax are not. Every line on the features page is marked either live now or building, and that distinction is the only thing keeping it from being a wish list.

What gets measured, and what doesn't: there is no rating anywhere on this site, no review count and no testimonial, because nobody is paying for MadeKeeper yet. When that changes I'll say so plainly instead of putting up a wall of stars. The free calculators import the same math file the app runs, so the free answer and the paid one can't quietly disagree. And when the live app throws an error it files itself into a table I read, along with the step in setup where somebody stopped — which is how I find out a screen is broken without waiting for the email that mostly never comes.

If MadeKeeper stops, your books don't go with it

This is the question I'd rather answer now than be asked in year three. One person builds this. What happens to three years of your records if he gets bored, or sick, or just runs out of nights?

I'm not going to put odds on that, and I'm not going to write you a wind-down clause I'd have to be around to honor. What I can do is make leaving cost nothing on an ordinary Tuesday, and that part is built rather than promised. It is four buttons inside the app. No request, no notice, no permission:

• Materials — every material with its unit, its cost per unit, what's on hand and the level you asked to be warned at.
• Products — name, price, count on hand, your hours, lead days, shelf days.
• Recipes — one row per ingredient of every product, with how much of it goes in, in what unit, and what that material costs you. This is the file nobody gives you, and it is what makes rebuilding a switched-from catalog by hand take a week.
• The tax packet, for any range you pick — profit and loss, revenue by channel, inventory at cost, the Schedule C lines, and underneath all of it a line item for every sale, booth fee, mileage claim and expense in the period.

What isn't in those four files: batches, lots and variants leave inside the numbers they produced rather than as rows of their own. That's a gap, and I'd rather you heard it here than found it on the way out. If you want everything held under your account, email me and I'll send it; deleting the account is the same address.

The reason this matters to me is that it is the thing that happened to a lot of the people reading this — a tool they had fed for years changed under them. I can't promise a company won't change. I can make sure the leaving is already built on the day you'd need it.

Who is writing this

I'm a Honda master technician. I've been one for twenty-five years, and I'm the shop foreman where I work. I'm not a maker, and the rest of this page is going to be straight about that before it's anything else.

I don't make things. I live around people who do.

My wife quilts. A quilt out of our house takes about a month, or it takes a year if it gets done a little at a time after everything else in the day is finished. My in-laws keep somewhere around forty chickens and sell the eggs; we keep four and those are just ours. I have friends who have sold candles and friends who have sold soap.

So what I have watched from a foot away is not the craft. I couldn't cut a binding strip or pour a wick straight to save my life. What I have watched is the accounting that sits around the craft, which is the part nobody enjoys and the part that quietly decides whether any of it was worth doing.

The question that is really the whole product

It came out of my own kitchen, about a finished quilt:

Materials are the easy half of that. You can add up fabric and batting and thread on the back of the receipt. The hours are the half that never gets counted, because they arrive thirty and forty minutes at a time over weeks and nobody is holding a stopwatch. MadeKeeper counts them, puts them next to what the piece actually sold for, and tells you what the hour paid.

The number is not a verdict

This part matters to me more than the math does. Whatever MadeKeeper works out, it doesn't get to decide what the number means.

Maybe five or six dollars an hour is perfectly fine. If it is half an hour a night with the TV on and it is the part of the day you look forward to, you didn't do a whole lot for it and you were using it to unwind anyway. Two hundred dollars at the end of that is found money. Somebody else, doing the same hours to cover a bill, is going to look at the same number and go up eight dollars on the price. Both of those are correct, and neither one is my call.

So everywhere MadeKeeper works out what an hour paid — a piece, a batch, a whole Saturday at a booth — it gives you the number and then gets out of the way. It won't scold you for charging too little. There is no nagging screen about your margins. You know what your time is for; I don't.

What I do have in common with you

Sixty hours a week. About an hour in the truck each way, twelve-hour days in between. I came up flat rate, which teaches you to grind out every hour you can get, and I still work through lunch most days and eat at my toolbox. As foreman I dispatch the work, help the other techs figure out what is actually wrong with the car in front of them, and keep track of where everybody is and what each of them is good at.

I live check to check. I budget so that gas money is never the thing that runs out, because if I can't get to work, I don't make the next check. That's not a sad story, it's just how the month is organized, and a lot of people reading this organize theirs the same way.

Which is why the money from a Saturday matters out of all proportion to its size. It's Christmas. It's the power bill. It's being able to hand your kid money for the thing their friends are all doing, instead of being the parent who has to say no. That is the person MadeKeeper is built for, and it is the only reason I spend my nights on it.

Why nineteen dollars

The software in this category tends to be priced for a business with a warehouse and a bookkeeper, and it is good software for that business. It's just not built for someone selling at a market on Saturday to cover a bill on Monday, and the price says so before you get through the first screen.

MadeKeeper is nineteen dollars a month. That's not a teaser and it isn't a discount; nineteen is what it costs to run a business this small properly. There is no trial and no card asked for — you put one in when you decide to subscribe, and not before. Nothing is ever taken off you: the shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair, with no cap on how many products you keep. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more than one fair are what the nineteen opens. There is one add-on beyond that — MadeKeeper AI, at twenty-four dollars a month — if you want it reading your receipts and your shelf from a photo. Nineteen is the price, and it is not going up on anyone who keeps the subscription. The pricing page has the rest of it.

You will not find a testimonial on this site, because there is nobody to quote yet. Nobody is paying for MadeKeeper. When that changes I will say so plainly rather than inventing a wall of five stars, and the features page marks every single thing as live now or still building for the same reason.

Where I stop

I don't know your craft's conventions and I'm not going to pretend to. How much of a forty-four inch bolt you can actually use, how much backing overage your longarmer wants, how long a bar of soap ought to cure — those are arguments inside a craft, and people who have done it for twenty years disagree with each other about them. So MadeKeeper ships a sourced default, makes it a setting you own and can change once for the whole shop, and every answer tells you which assumption it used to get there.

There are also things it deliberately won't do. It won't compute calories. It won't invent a barcode, and it won't decide for you whether something counts as an allergen. Get one of those wrong and it isn't an inconvenience, it's a false statement on a label with your name printed on it. I'd rather hand you a blank you have to fill in yourself than a confident number that is wrong.

Getting hold of me

Email is james@madekeeper.com. There is no support department behind that address. It is me, usually after the shop, and I read everything that comes in. If something in here is wrong for the way your craft actually works, that is the address to say so at. It is the fastest way anything gets changed.

Written August 22, 2026. Revised August 29, 2026 — the product, and the leaving answer, moved to the top.