MakeKeeper 0.18.0 went out on 7 September 2026. Nothing in it is a new module. It is about the part of the product that had been left to chance: what happens in the first five minutes, before anyone has decided whether this is worth keeping.

A first install lands on a workshop, not on a void

Until now a fresh instance opened on empty tables, and an empty inventory tracker looks exactly like a broken one. There is no way to tell, from a blank screen, whether the storage map is any good.

A new instance is now seeded with a demo workshop — items, projects, suppliers and storage, wired to each other the way real ones are. You can open the project board, follow a part to its drawer and read a purchase back to the step that needed it, all before typing anything. When you have seen enough, a banner offers one action to empty it out, and the instance is yours with nothing left behind.

Settings → About: a route back to us

Feedback used to require going and finding the repository. Settings → About now gathers what the product is, which version you are on and whether it is current, and a prefilled path to report a bug or ask for a feature — the version and the environment already filled in, because those are the fields nobody enjoys copying and everybody is asked for anyway.

Liveness reporting, off by default

An instance can now tell us that it is alive, so we can see the product is being used. This is the kind of thing that deserves saying carefully, so:

It is off unless you switch it on. Not off-until-you-notice, not on-with-an-opt-out.
The consent dialog says in plain words what is sent, before you decide.
The settings page shows you the exact report before it leaves.

What it is not is a channel for your data. Your projects, inventory and purchases stay in your own database on your own hardware, as they always have, and nothing about them is part of the report. The privacy page says the same thing in the place you would go looking for it.

The consent dialog also switches the interface language, which is where a first-run visitor turns out to want it.

Images on Docker Hub as well

Every release now publishes to docker.io/makekeeper/app and docker.io/makekeeper/web alongside ghcr.io/makekeeper/{app,web}, with a proper listing on each. Nothing changes for an existing install — the installer keeps pulling what it pulled — but the images are now where people look for images first.

Both READMEs rewritten

Both READMEs were written for someone already inside the project. They are now written for a reader deciding whether to install it: what it does, what it looks like, what it costs to run. Six screens in both themes, and the phone capture flow as a GIF, so the product has a face in its own repository. The material for people working on the code moved to docs/architecture.md, where it stops competing with the pitch.

Fixes

The demo banner waits for a session before asking, and survives a narrow column. Registering a plugin id twice replaces it instead of quietly leaving two. Telemetry retries are paced by attempt, and the answer comes back before the report goes out. A pass over the settings screens repaired the drift an audit had turned up.

Also in 0.18.1

A patch went out the next day, on 8 September 2026, and it is what an install pulls now:

Scrolling works again inside pull-to-refresh views — the refresh wrapper hands its content a bounded height instead of letting the list grow past the screen.
One rule under the header, drawn the same way in all three regions rather than three times over in three thicknesses.
A one-time coach mark is spent when it is read, not when it is drawn — so the hint no longer burns itself on a screen you never looked at.
API answers are served no-store from both ends, while uploaded media keeps its immutable caching. A stale answer to a question about your own stock is worse than a slow one.

Behind the scenes: a test run no longer evicts the dev server’s pre-bundle, and CI builds and tests before a tag is cut, so a release can no longer be published from a tree that fails the sweep.

Next: 0.18.2 — the images run natively on ARM. Previously: 0.17 — the workshop learns to remind you. It is still free, still yours, and still one command to install.

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MakeKeeper 0.18: the first five minutes