The week we built the parts you will never see

We open at the end of June. So this week went into the parts of the product you will never see, and would only ever notice if they failed: the ones that decide whether we have earned the right to hold a record of your house.

Three of them, the same shape.

The first is backups. Until this week, appkeep’s data lived on a single machine, which is fine right up until the morning it is not. So we built a nightly job that copies the whole database, encrypts it, and ships it to a second place, off that machine, where the key to open it is not kept. That part is ordinary, and plenty of people stop there. We took one of those backups, decrypted it on a different computer, and rebuilt the database from scratch, to be sure it comes back. We would rather learn that with nothing at stake than on the morning we need it.

The second is the front door. We tightened how accounts are created, and made sure an account can only be used once its email is confirmed, so the record of your house stays yours and not someone who typed your address.

The third is the part of a subscription you usually only meet when you are trying to leave. Before we had written a line of the paywall, we wrote down the rules we will hold ourselves to: we tell you a renewal is coming before it charges; and leaving is exactly as easy as joining, the same handful of clicks, no maze, no phone call. We put that in writing now, while it costs us nothing, because the time to commit to it is before you have a quarter of revenue to protect.

None of this is visible from the outside. That is the point. The work that earns trust is the work nobody sees, and it has to be done before you ask for the trust, not after something breaks. A week out, that is the work.

Opens to homeowners end of June.