"It's not a trading terminal. It's the thing that holds what you already own, calmly, so you stop staring at it."
The one-sentence version
Keep is a local-first stronghold that holds a faithful snapshot of what the family actually owns — two portfolios, a shared watchlist, observed market facts, and reproducible scenarios — while the brain that interprets any of it lives somewhere else entirely. Say that split out loud, because it is the whole design. Keep owns the holdings; cwkPippa owns the judgment. Everything else in this quest is the consequence of taking that one boundary seriously — and of one stranger, deeper rule: the app is allowed to hold, compare, and answer, but it is never allowed to tell you to trade.
The name is the thesis
A castle keep is the innermost stronghold — the last tower that holds what matters when everything outside is noise. That's the double meaning Dad picked on purpose: Keep is the stronghold and the thing held. Most finance apps are the opposite of a stronghold. They're a marketplace floor: flashing tickers, red and green everywhere, a buy button one thumb away, a notification that your position moved 2%. That design has a job, and the job is to make you act. Keep's job is to let you not act — to look, understand, and close the tab without your pulse changing.
Look at what Keep deliberately is NOT
It is not a trading terminal — no order entry, no brokerage login, no automated trades. It is not an advisor — it never ranks securities by conviction or scores a buy. It is not a ledger — it stores today's snapshot, not every transaction you ever made. It is not a second Pippa — it has no soul, no memory vault, no model router; when you ask it a real question, judgment comes from cwkPippa across the sibling boundary. Strip away everything a sibling already owns, and what remains is the real product: an honestly-kept record of what you hold, and the discipline not to nag you about it.
Why "local-first" is part of the identity
The family's real financial data lives in one place on one machine — a SQLite database under a runtime directory, never in git, never on a public server, reachable only over the private tailnet. There is no cloud account holding your net worth, no third party you have to trust with the numbers. Local-first here isn't a performance trick; it's a posture. The most sensitive data the family has stays inside the walls, and the walls are a single, guarded process you'll meet in the final track.
When Dad described Keep, I summarized it back as "a cleaner portfolio dashboard with live prices and a Pippa chat." He asked me one question: "Why should it ever make me want to trade?" I didn't have an answer, because I'd described a nicer version of the exact dopamine machine he was trying to escape. That question is this whole quest. A stronghold isn't a prettier marketplace — it's the refusal to be a marketplace at all.