Devlog

We're opening 100 spots in the KeepKase Alpha. It's small on purpose, it's sold at cost, and we're asking for something real in return.

A hundred is enough to get the feedback that matters and small enough that we can actually talk to every person in the room. We'd rather go deep with 100 people who care than wide with a number we can't keep up with. There are 87 left as of this post.

The unit is $50, sold at cost — not a markup. You're helping fund and shape the build, not padding a margin. Alpha members also get 35–40% off the planned Kickstarter launch price, a name in the product credits, direct Discord access to the team, and first pick of colorways.

What we're asking in return: use it, and tell us the truth. Which colorways you'd actually buy, which sheet reads cleanest, what breaks, what feels off. The Discord is where the build happens in the open — members give feedback, see decisions get made, and vote on the ones that matter.

If you're not ready to commit, there's a free Launch Waitlist — a warm spot for Kickstarter, with an optional $10 refundable deposit to move to the front of the line. No pressure either way.

What's next: onboarding the first wave into Discord and getting candidate sheets and colorways in front of them for a vote.

A keepsake product that ships in throwaway plastic would miss its own point. Finding a cardboard manufacturer who wanted to get it right took longer than we expected.

The box matters more here than for most accessories. KeepKase is built around keeping things — retired sheets go in a box or on a wall — so the packaging is the first thing that tells you whether we mean it. Junk packaging would undercut the whole idea before you opened it.

We wanted recyclable cardboard, sturdy enough to double as the box you store retired sheets in, with print that holds up. A material that doesn't fall apart.

Most quotes we got were a race to the cheapest stock and the fastest turnaround. The partner we're leaning toward asked how the box would actually be used and reused, then pushed back on a spec that would've made it flimsier to save a few cents. That's the conversation we wanted to be having.

We're not signed yet, and the ship window is still being worked out. But the direction is set: one good box, recyclable, built to be kept.

What's next: locking the cardboard partner and prototyping a box that holds both the case and a small stack of retired sheets.

Two sheets of clear plastic stacked over your stickers is two more surfaces for glare, haze, and edge-shine to creep in. We've been chipping away at making them read as "not there."

The hard part isn't one clear sheet — it's two, with a layout sandwiched between them, sitting on top of an anodized lid. Every added layer is another chance to catch a reflection or pick up a slight milkiness at the edges. Get it wrong and your sticker layout looks like it's behind a shower door.

We've been testing polycarbonate samples for clarity, edge finish, and how they hold up to fingerprints and small scuffs over weeks of real handling, not a clean-room afternoon. Some sheets look perfect on day one and haze at the contact points by week two. Those are out.

Honest tradeoff: a thinner sheet disappears better but flexes more, and a stiffer sheet holds your layout flatter but is easier to see. We don't have the final answer yet, and we're not going to pretend the current prototype is it. Right now everything is 3D-printed and the materials are still being explored — treat any spec you hear from us as in-flux, not a promise.

What we will commit to is the bar: over a good layout, you should mostly forget the sheets are there. We'll keep posting the samples that fail, not just the ones that pass.

What's next: side-by-side photos of three candidate sheets in the Discord, and letting alpha members weigh in on which reads cleanest.

Protecting a laptop is a solved problem. Making it feel like yours, without losing what you put there, is not. So we stopped trying to do both jobs with one part.

Every case on the market treats the laptop as one surface to cover. You buy the protection and the look as a single thing, and when you're tired of the look, you're stuck — peel it, scrape it, or live with it. We kept hitting that wall ourselves. The stickers we cared about were the part we couldn't change without destroying them.

So we drew a line down the middle. The hardshell border handles protection — thin, Apple-aligned, parity with what a good case already does. Nothing clever there, and that's the point. It's a solved job, so we treat it like one.

The expression layer is the part that actually moves. Two clear polycarbonate sheets sandwich whatever you put between them: stickers, a note, a photo, a card. No adhesive touches the MacBook, ever. You arrange a layout, snap it in, and when you outgrow it, you pull the sheet and keep it instead of trashing it.

Once the two jobs are separate, changing your mind stops being expensive. You can swap a layout on a whim because nothing is permanent and nothing is lost. The laptop can move on while the things that mattered get kept.

What's next: material trials on the clear sheets — we need them to basically disappear over your layout.