How it works
You give Persistwise the RSS feed for your blog, newsletter, or social account. Persistwise does not host your writing or change where you publish. It reads the feed and keeps copies of each post in three places, so a post can still be found if the platform it was written on goes away.
Reading your feed
While Keep is active, Persistwise checks each of your feeds every 15 minutes. A feed you add is checked straight away, and you can press "Check now" on your Feeds page to check a feed again at any time.
Each time it checks, it looks for entries it has not seen before. The first check takes in every entry the feed lists at that moment, which for most feeds is the most recent handful of posts. Older posts that no longer appear in the feed are not picked up.
Each post is captured once, when Persistwise first sees it. If you edit a post later, the copies keep the version that was there when it was first captured.
The saved copy
For each new post, Persistwise downloads the page the feed entry links to and saves its HTML on our own storage. It fetches the page the way a signed-out visitor would see it. This is the HTML document only; images and stylesheets are not saved with it.
This saved copy is what we send to IPFS, and it is there to fall back on if an outside service is slow or down. You can open it from your Archive page with the "Saved copy" link. Only you can open it, and only while you are signed in. We show it with its scripts turned off, so it may look plainer than the original or be missing parts that need scripts.
Wayback Machine snapshots
Persistwise then asks the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to capture the post's address with Save Page Now. The snapshot lives on archive.org, is public, and anyone can open it without Persistwise.
Posts are sent to the Wayback Machine one at a time, a few seconds apart. A capture usually takes a few minutes, and Persistwise checks on it every 15 seconds for about five minutes. The Wayback Machine limits how many captures it accepts and is sometimes busy. If it turns a capture away or the capture is not done in time, Persistwise waits and tries again on a later feed check, about once an hour, until a snapshot is saved. When the Wayback Machine asks us to slow down, we wait as long as it asks before sending more. Until a snapshot is saved, the post shows "Wayback: saving", or "Wayback: trying again" once a try has failed.
IPFS pins and content IDs
IPFS is a public network for sharing files where a file is found by what is in it rather than by which server holds it. Persistwise uploads the local HTML copy to Pinata, a pinning service, which keeps it available on the public IPFS network. That is what "pinned" means: a service has promised to keep holding the file.
Every file on IPFS has a content ID, or CID. The CID is worked out from the file's contents, a little like a fingerprint. The same file always has the same CID, and any change to the file gives a different one. So a CID points at that exact copy of your post, and any IPFS gateway can serve it.
A gateway is a website that fetches a file from IPFS and shows it in your browser. The IPFS links on your Archive page go through a gateway that opens pages in an ordinary browser. Some well-known public gateways, such as ipfs.io and dweb.link, now block ordinary visitors, so we do not use them. Because the CID is the same everywhere, you can paste it into any other gateway that works for you.
The pin happens after the Wayback step is done or has failed for now. If pinning fails, Persistwise tries again on the next feed check. Because the IPFS copy is the saved HTML only, it may look plainer than the original page.
The dashboard
When you are signed in, two pages show what is happening.
- Feeds lists each feed, when it was last checked, and the error if the last check failed. A feed that fails is checked again about once an hour, and goes back to normal once a check succeeds.
- Archive lists each captured post, newest first, with a short status for each copy: "Wayback: saving", "Wayback: trying again" or "Wayback: saved", "IPFS: saving", "IPFS: trying again" or "IPFS: pinned", and "Saved copy: ready". "Trying again" means a try has failed and Persistwise will try again. Each ready copy is a link. A post is marked "archived" only once both the Wayback snapshot and the IPFS pin are done; until then it says "in progress", or "partial" if Keep is paused and a copy is still missing.
The 30-day trial
Keep is 30 days free, then $40/year. You do not need a card to start. After you create an account, press "Start free trial" on your Feeds page or your Account page. Stripe, our payment provider, starts the trial without asking for a card. Once Stripe confirms it, usually within moments, you can add feeds.
Your Account page and Feeds page show how many days are left. About three days before the trial ends, we send you an email if you have not added a card yet.
To keep archiving after the trial, press "Add a card" on your Account page. This opens Stripe's billing page, where you save a card. When the trial ends, Stripe charges $40 for the first year and Keep carries on.
If the trial ends without a card
Keep pauses. Persistwise stops checking your feeds, so new posts are not archived, and you cannot add new feeds. Nothing is deleted. Your feeds stay in your account, and your Archive page, with its Wayback, IPFS and saved-copy links, stays readable.
To resume, add a card on your Account page, then press "Resume Keep." Resuming charges $40 that day and starts a new year from that date. Persistwise checks your feeds again from the next scheduled check. Posts you published while Keep was paused are picked up only if they are still listed in your feed.
If you stop paying
The same is true if you cancel, or if a yearly renewal cannot be charged. While Stripe retries a failed payment, Keep keeps running. Once the subscription ends, new archiving stops and everything already archived stays readable. We do not remove your Wayback snapshots or IPFS pins when Keep stops. The Wayback snapshots are kept by the Internet Archive, not by us, so they do not depend on Persistwise.