Keel

An operations system for independent studios and solo consultants, built around one idea most project tools miss: scope is a contract, and it leaks.

The problem

Freelancers and small studios don't usually lose money on projects they priced wrong. They lose it on projects they priced correctly and then quietly over-delivered. The extra revision, the "quick call", the feature that wasn't in the statement of work — each one is small enough to absorb, and collectively they turn a profitable engagement into a break-even one. By the time it's visible in a time report, the money is already spent.

Harvest tracks hours. Notion tracks tasks. Bonsai sends invoices. None of them watch the gap between what you contracted to deliver and what you are actually delivering, and tell you while you can still do something about it.

The wedge

Every project in Keel carries an explicit scope: deliverables with estimates, and a contracted value. As time is logged, Keel continuously compares burned value against contracted value, and completion against estimate. When a project starts consuming budget faster than it produces deliverables, it gets flagged — with an explanation of why, and a one-click path to turn the overage into a change order you can actually send.

The pitch is one sentence: know a project is going over while you can still bill for it.

Live

https://keel-beige-seven.vercel.app — redeployed automatically after each day's commit.

Data pages return 500 in production until a hosted database is attached. Vercel's filesystem is read-only, so the file:./keel.db fallback has nothing to open. Create a free Turso database and run ./scripts/set-database.sh <libsql-url> <auth-token> to fix it. Local development and CI are unaffected — tests run against an in-memory database.

Status

Under construction, one increment per day, on the plan in ROADMAP.md. Progress is visible in the commit history — the build is autonomous, so each commit is a single roadmap task.

Running it

npm install
cp .env.example .env
npm run db:generate && npm run db:migrate
npm run dev

Tests: npm test. Production build: npm run build.

Stack

Next.js 16 (App Router), TypeScript, Tailwind v4, Drizzle ORM over libSQL (a local SQLite file in development, Turso in production without a driver change), Vitest.