Why FairKeep exists

For years I kept track of my wife’s business in a spreadsheet. Which markets she had, when she had them, what they cost, and what she made on them. You can run a season that way, and plenty of people do. But a spreadsheet never tells you the thing you actually want to know, which is whether a show was worth doing again.

Last year I built a web application to help with it. Then I built a few more — Shopify reporting for inventory and income, tax reporting, and a handful of other pieces that each solved one more part of the same problem.

That is where FairKeep came from. Everything here was built for a real booth, at real markets, by someone who was tired of doing it the hard way. You can see the business it was built for on its Skoshie & Friends page — which is itself a FairKeep public vendor page, the same one every account gets.

I know a lot of other vendors dealing with exactly the same things. Keeping track of events. Keeping track of income. Keeping track of expenses. Getting any kind of reporting out of all of it, and wiring up third-party systems like Shopify and Square along the way. It is a lot of work, spread across a lot of different systems that were never meant to talk to each other.

So I opened it up, so other vendors could use it too.

We’re in beta

Right now FairKeep is in beta and invite-only. Hit Request Access at the top of the page to ask for an invite.

And I would genuinely appreciate any feedback you have. New features, bugs, something that works but works awkwardly — send it in through the contact form or the Report Issue button inside the app. I read all of it. I want this to be a better application for everybody, and the fastest way there is people telling me what is wrong with it.

Bring other vendors with you

You’re a vendor, so you probably know other vendors — and you probably already help them out, because this is a tight-knit community that grows by pulling each other along. You can invite them here too. Your referral link is in Settings, under Referrals.

Once we turn subscriptions on, referrals start paying: you’ll earn a 10% affiliate commission when someone you brought in upgrades to a paid plan. Nothing is being billed while we’re in beta, so there is nothing to earn on yet — but the people you refer now are credited to you for when it goes live. So FairKeep can be a tool for your business in more ways than one. 🙂

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy using it. Let me know what you think.