How it works
Three promises. One Keeper. One receipt.
This page is the whole method with nothing held back. If you read it and decide you can run it yourself without paying us, genuinely, go and do that. It works better with somebody holding the copy, which is the only thing we are actually selling.
The shape of a promise
What makes a promise keepable.
Most promises fail before the first day, in the wording. Here is the test a Keeper puts every promise through.
1. First person, out loud
"I promise I'll…" not "get fitter". You are making an agreement with yourself, and agreements have a subject.
2. A stranger could score it
If two people watching your day could disagree about whether you did it, it is not a promise yet. "Eat better" fails. "Cook dinner on weeknights" passes.
3. Attached to something that already happens
After the kettle. Before the school run. When the laptop shuts. Promises anchored to an existing part of your day survive far longer than promises anchored to a time of day.
4. Small enough to be slightly embarrassing
If it does not feel a bit too easy, it is too big. The version you can do on your worst day is the version that becomes permanent. You can always make it bigger later; almost nobody recovers from starting too big.
5. Names a person, not a metric
"Someone who runs" beats "run 20km a week". You are not chasing a number, you are collecting evidence about who you are. There is decent research behind this and it is on the science page.
6. Survives a bad week
Your Keeper will ask what happens to this promise the week you get ill, or your child does, or work goes sideways. If the answer is "it dies", they will shrink it now rather than watch it die later.
The timeline
What happens, in order, from the minute you sign up.
Minute one to four
You write your first promise. One box, your words, 140 characters. You sign it with your finger. That is the entire sign-up; there is no quiz and no seven-step wizard.
Within 48 hours
A named Keeper messages you on WhatsApp. They have read your promise. They come back with two or three questions and a rewritten version, plus a suggestion for your second and third promise. You approve, edit, or argue. Then you sign the final three.
Week one
A 20-minute call if you want one, and daily sealing from the first night. Most people find the first four days easy and are slightly smug about it. That is normal and it is not the test.
Somewhere around day eleven
The wall. Not because you are weak — because the novelty is gone and the promise has not yet become automatic. This is the exact moment a habit app loses you, and the exact moment a person asking you a direct question does not. Your Keeper knows the day-eleven pattern and will already be in your messages.
Any third miss on the same promise
Your Keeper is notified that day and rewrites the promise smaller. You are not asked to explain yourself and nobody is disappointed in you. A promise broken three times is a design fault.
Day thirty
Your first Receipt is issued from sealed days. Most people are surprised by it in both directions: the promise they thought they were nailing usually is not, and the one they felt guilty about usually is fine.
Day sixty-six, give or take
Median time for a daily behaviour to feel automatic in the best-known study of this, with a very wide range either side. Around here it is when people stop needing the reminder and start noticing they did it before they thought about it. When one promise goes automatic, you have earned a fourth slot.
Day ninety
Three Receipts. A written review from your Keeper. And, if it has gone the way it usually does, a slightly annoying new belief that you are somebody who does what they said.
Sealing
Two taps, and then it is locked.
Sealing is the only daily action. Kept, or owned. There is no mood slider, no journal prompt you will abandon in nine days, no reflection field.
Once sealed, a day cannot be changed by you, by your Keeper, or by us. That constraint is the entire reason the Receipt is worth anything. A record you can edit is not a record, it is a mood board.
You can seal late. Yesterday stays open until 10am, because sometimes you fall asleep. After that it locks as unsealed, which is neither kept nor owned, and it is the only thing that hurts your Word Rate.
Tuesday, day 61
Word Rate 100%Two taps and you're done. There is nothing else to fill in.
Run before work
Trainers by the door — not sealed yet
Phone out of the bedroom
On the kitchen shelf by 10pm — not sealed yet
Last 75 days
kept owned still to come
Run before work — 44 of 61
Phone out of the bedroom — 55 of 61
Days you told the truth — 61 of 61
Nobody can hit 100% on the first two bars. Everybody can hit it on the third.
The one number
Word Rate is not a completion percentage.
Every tracker ever built shows you one number: what fraction of the boxes are ticked. It is a terrible number, because the fastest way to improve it is to promise less and lie more.
Word Rate measures something else entirely: of the days this promise was live, on how many did you show up and tell the truth? A kept day counts. An owned day counts. Only an unsealed day — the day you went quiet — costs you anything.
So the honest miss is free, and the disappearance is not. That is on purpose, and it is the difference between a number that describes your character and a number that describes your admin.
Write one promise and see what a Keeper does with it.
You do not have to decide about the other two yet. Write the one you have been putting off since roughly February.
First month refunded in full if you sealed your days and it did not work for you.