Getting started
This takes a few minutes. You will need an email address and the address of your RSS or Atom feed.
1. Create an account
Create an account with your email address and a password. You can turn on two-factor authentication later from your account settings if you would like to.
2. Start your free trial
Creating an account does not start the trial by itself. Press "Start free trial" on your Feeds page or your Account page. Stripe, our payment provider, starts a 30-day trial without asking for a card, then sends you back to Persistwise. Keep starts as soon as Stripe confirms, which is usually within moments.
3. Add your first feed
On your Feeds page, press "Add a feed" and paste your feed's address.
RSS, Atom and JSON Feed all work. Many platforms put it at an address
like /feed, /rss or /feed.xml. You
can give the feed a name and pick whether it is a blog, a newsletter or
a social account; these are labels for you and do not change how it is
archived.
4. What you will see, and when
Persistwise checks a new feed as soon as you add it, then every 15 minutes after that. Refresh the Feeds page after a moment to see when it was last checked. You can press "Check now" next to a feed to check it again at any time.
The first check takes in every post the feed lists at that moment, not only posts from now on. After that, new posts are picked up on the next check after they appear in your feed.
For each post, roughly in this order:
- It appears on your Archive page once its page has been saved and it is its turn to go to the Wayback Machine. Posts are sent one at a time, a few seconds apart, so a feed with many posts takes a few minutes to fill in, and longer if the Wayback Machine asks us to slow down.
- "Wayback: saved" appears when the Internet Archive finishes the snapshot, which usually takes a few minutes. The Wayback Machine limits how many captures it takes, so a busy day can take longer. Until then the post shows "Wayback: saving". If a try does not work, it shows "Wayback: trying again", and Persistwise tries again about once an hour.
- "IPFS: pinned" appears shortly after the first Wayback try, whether or not it worked. The link opens the copy through a public IPFS gateway that works in an ordinary browser.
- "Saved copy: ready" links to the copy we keep. Only you can open it, and it is shown with its scripts turned off.
A post marked "in progress", "saving" or "trying again" is still being worked on and will be retried; you do not need to do anything. It is marked "archived" once both the Wayback snapshot and the IPFS pin are done. Your Feeds page shows when each feed was last checked, and the error if a check failed.
5. Add a card before the trial ends
Your Account and Feeds pages show how many trial days are left. About three days before the end, we email you if no card is on file. To keep archiving, press "Add a card" on your Account page and save a card on Stripe's page. When the trial ends, Stripe charges $40 for the first year.
6. Resuming after a pause
If the trial ends without a card, Keep pauses. New posts are not archived and you cannot add feeds, but everything already archived stays on your Archive page.
To pick up again, go to your Account page, press "Add a card" and save a card, then press "Resume Keep." Resuming charges $40 that day and starts a new year from that date. Your feeds are checked again from the next 15-minute check. Posts you published while paused are archived only if your feed still lists them.