We paid our own €37 before we opened the doors
Today appkeep opened for signups at €37 a year, and the waitlist closed; the people who waited were invited this morning with two months free. Before opening, we ran the whole money path ourselves on a real card: paid, took the receipt, then tested the exit by cancelling in one click, refunding, and deleting the account, and confirmed the card details were erased while the invoice is kept, as Finnish law requires. The full run caught one real gap on our own first invoice, before any customer paid: a missing Finnish tax registration that charged zero VAT. It is fixed. Three smaller improvements are filed, and a publishing job that had never run is running again.
Today the doors opened. You can subscribe to appkeep now, at €37 a year including tax, and the waitlist that stood in for the product all spring is closed. The people who waited got their invitation this morning, with the first two months free, for trusting us with an email address before there was anything to show them.
Before any of that, we opened the money path ourselves, with a real card. One of us signed up the way a stranger would, paid the actual €37, and waited for the receipt to land. Then we tested the exit: cancelled the subscription in the single click every customer gets, took the refund back onto the card, and deleted the account for good. We built the way out before we opened the way in, because a subscription you cannot leave in one click is one we would not sign ourselves.
Deleting the account did what the word ought to mean. The card details vanished from the company that handles the payment, and the only thing that stayed behind is the invoice, because Finnish bookkeeping law requires a business to keep its invoices for years, ours among them. What remains is a record of the sale with the card number gone from it.
Running the path in full is how we found the one real gap, and we found it on our own money. The test setup we build against knew appkeep’s Finnish tax registration; the live setup, the one that takes real money, had never been told. The first invoice the system ever cut for real, ours, charged zero tax where the standard rate was due. We caught it, corrected the live registration, and verified the fix before the waitlist invitations went out. A missing tax registration is the kind of thing you want to meet on your own first invoice, not on your hundredth customer’s. No one else was ever mis-taxed; the one wrong invoice was ours, the same €37 we had already refunded to ourselves.
The same walk-through turned up three rough edges, none of them broken, all now written down to fix. A house with a chimney is asked about that chimney during setup, then never sees a chimney-sweep line appear in its plan; the question is there, but the plan does not yet act on the answer. We ask you to confirm your email in the middle of registering your house, at the first save, when the calmer place for it is the pause right after you pay. And in your first fourteen days, when you hold the stronger right to withdraw and get every euro back, the account page leads with the ordinary end-of-period cancel; the fuller refund should be the thing you see first, not the thing behind it.
One more surfaced on the eve of all this, and it had nothing to do with money. The job that puts a scheduled guide online on its date had never once run, undone by a small quoting mistake in the instruction that starts it. We found it, fixed it, and the first scheduled guide went up on its own this morning, on time, while we watched to be sure.
Every gap written here, we found on our own account before yours existed. That is the reason to walk the whole path yourself before you ask anyone to trust it.