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Kinkeep is alive — here's what we're building
Kinkeep started as a tool for cat colony volunteers. As the project grew, so did the scope.
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Free software, self-hosted
The animal record that outlives the volunteer who kept it
The people who feed colonies, foster, rescue and run shelters keep the record in a notebook, a spreadsheet or a group chat. It works until the person holding it stops, and years of history go with them. Kinkeep is that record, shared by the whole group and run on your own server.
What it replaces
Nothing here is a feature nobody asked for. Each of these is a thing that goes wrong when the record lives on one person’s phone.
A history that walks out of the door
Somebody moves away, or simply stops, and the medical history of forty animals goes with them. A shared record is the only fix, and it has to be shared before it is needed.
A dose nobody is counting
A course of medicine is every twelve hours for ten days, handed between three volunteers. Kinkeep turns the prescription into dated doses on a calendar, so it is not a thing somebody has to remember.
A photograph in a chat, three months ago
The wound that was healing, the cat that was thinner, the vet’s note. Attached to the entry it belongs to, not scrolled for.
What Kinkeep does
Built for the day to day of caring for animals in a group, not for an inventory of them.
Groups of any kind
A feral colony, a shelter, a household, a neighbourhood, or something you name yourself. Each group has its own profile, an optional location on a map, and one timeline combining everything from the group and every animal in it.
A full medical history
Every vet visit with its diagnosis, its treatment notes, the clinic and the person who saw the animal, and a next appointment that puts itself on the calendar. Searchable, per animal, for as long as the instance runs.
Prescriptions that count themselves
Attach a course to a visit with the medicine, the dose, the frequency and how many days it runs. Kinkeep generates the individual doses on the calendar, so a pill is not missed because three volunteers each thought somebody else had given it.
One calendar for everything
What happened and what should happen on the same grid: appointments, doses, events. Filter it down to one group or one animal, drag something to reschedule it, and mark it done from the screen you are on.
Weights and where they are going
Log a weight and see at a glance whether an animal is gaining, losing or steady against the last one. Kilograms, grams and pounds, with a chart and the numbers underneath it.
A timeline you can read
Medical visits, weights, notes, photos and events in the order they happened, filed under the day they happened on. Filter by kind to find what you are after in seconds.
You run it, and the data stays yours
A group holds volunteer contact details and colony locations, and a colony location in the wrong hands is a risk to the animals themselves. That is why this is self-hosted rather than a service, and why it is AGPL rather than open in name.
Sealed by default
Nothing crosses between groups without an explicit decision. Visibility is a policy each group carries, not a setting somebody forgets.
No account with us
One `podman compose up` and it is running on your machine. No subscription, no advertising, nothing to migrate away from, and the AGPL so it stays that way for whoever you serve.
How the work is done
- Free software, properly
- AGPL-3.0-or-later, so whoever runs an instance can modify it and anyone they serve gets the same right. Not a trial, not an open core.
- Developed in the open
- Everything is on Codeberg: the commit history, the issues, and the architecture decisions, written down with their costs from the first day.
- Documented for the person using it
- A user guide, not only a README. English and Spanish, both maintained by hand, and an API that documents itself.
- Built with the people who use it
- Every screen came out of a real situation somebody was in. What does not survive contact with a volunteer on a phone in a field does not stay.
From the blog
The software is early, the need is not
Kinkeep is in alpha and running with real groups. If you care for animals, build software, or fund this kind of work, there is a way in.