FAQ

Plain answers.

If something below is wrong or missing, email hello@gideonkeep.com.

Is Keep open?: Yes, in early access. Anyone can create an account at app.gideonkeep.com. It is not finished: it keeps and reads documents, and exchanges a Form 1040 with Gideon Tax; carryforwards, most of Business Keep and the year-over-year review are designed and not built. “What works today”, on the How it works page, marks every line.
What does it cost right now?: Nothing. There is no billing during early access, and creating an account asks for no card. When billing begins, Individual Keep is $20 a year and Business Keep is $80 a year, and nothing is charged until you have been told and have agreed. If you would rather not pay then, you take your records with you.
Should Keep be the only place I keep a document?: Not during early access. Keep your originals. Restoring from backup has not been rehearsed yet, and the security page says so; until it has, treat Keep as a second home for a document, not its only one.
Is Gideon Keep tax software?: No. Gideon Tax prepares and files returns. Keep retains, verifies and structures the information, documents, relationships and tax attributes a return is built from — and receives the results of each filing back, so the next one starts from known data.
Is it document storage?: Keep does keep your original documents, exactly as received, and never overwrites them. But that is the evidence, not the product. The product is the structured record beside each document: what Gideon read from it, what you confirmed or corrected, which relationship it belongs to, and which tax-year facts and attributes it supports.
Does an AI read my documents?: No. Keep's readers are ordinary software: they find each box by the title the IRS prints on it and read the value in it. The same file gives the same reading every time. No AI service is called, and your document is not sent anywhere else to be read. A photograph is read by a text-recognition program that runs inside Keep itself.
What happens when I upload a photo of a W-2?: Keep preserves the original, reads it into a structured record with a confidence on each field, checks it — the employer against the ones it knows, the EIN's form, the plausibility of the amounts, whether it is a file you already gave — and shows you what it read to confirm. Your answer is recorded beside the reading. If the reader was wrong and you corrected it, all three states survive. Comparing it with last year's form is not built yet.
Which forms does it read?: A W-2, and 38 information returns: the 1099s, 1098s and 5498s, and Forms 1097-BTC, 3921, 3922 and W-2G. It reads the amounts and dates, who issued the form, the account number and the year; codes, ticked boxes and state lines you choose or type on the confirmation page. A K-1 or a 1095-A is kept and typed in. A scan saved as a PDF is kept but not read — a photo of the same page is.
What about a corrected 1099?: The design: the original is not deleted, Keep records the corrected form, understands which one is controlling for preparation, and keeps the history. Today: both can be uploaded and both are kept, but Keep does not yet tie the corrected form to the one it corrects or choose between them.
What is a carryforward, and why does Keep make so much of it?: A tax attribute that survives across years: a capital loss carryforward, a net operating loss, a suspended passive loss, a charitable or credit carryforward, an adoption credit. Most software treats it as a number to copy from last year's form. Keep treats it as a record with an origin, every amount used and by which return, every adjustment, and a balance derived from that history. That ledger is built and tested, and nothing feeds it yet: no return hands Keep a carryforward today, and you cannot enter one yourself.
The adoption credit specifically?: Yes, explicitly — it is the case the ledger was designed around. An unused portion may continue into later years, and it should not depend on parsing an old Form 8839 each year. Keep is to hold the credit as its own attribute — originating year, amounts determined and used, remaining balance, the adoption record and documents, any amendment — and make it available to that year's tax software, subject to that year's rules. It is not carried yet.
Will it prepare my return automatically?: Keep is built to make that possible: a sufficiently ordinary returning taxpayer with complete documents should have most or all of a draft prepared from what Gideon already knows. Today Gideon Tax drafts a Form 1040 from Keep: who is on the return, the address, the employers, and every W-2, 1099 and 1098 Keep holds for the year, each on the page for its form — even if you have never filed with Gideon Tax and only put this year's documents in Keep. That never means filing without you. The draft is yours: you go through every page, change what is not right, add the credits, deductions and income no document says, and authorize.
Does the subscription include a person?: No. It pays for software, storage, structured data, document processing, automated verification and reasonable product support. Human tax preparation, research, consulting, bookkeeping, reconciliation and manual data entry are not inside a $20 or $80 subscription and are priced separately. That is how the price stays honest.
Why is it so cheap?: Because the value is continuity, not bytes, and continuity only works if you never reconsider it. The plan is for Gideon Tax to become free as its development costs are recovered — “tax is tollware” — with Keep as the paid layer underneath, priced so it is never the thing you cut.
Will it renew automatically?: When billing begins, yes: a year at a time, and you can cancel at any time and export everything first. During early access there is nothing to renew.
Can I leave with my data?: Yes, and in a useful form. Today the owner of an account can take one documented, machine-readable file of everything Keep holds: the profile, yearly facts, relationships, each document's reading and your confirmations, where every value came from, and the filing history. Identification numbers leave by their last four digits — you already have your numbers, and a file on a laptop is not protected the way Keep is. Each document's own file is downloaded from its page; a single bundle with the files in it is not built yet.
Does Keep work with software other than Gideon Tax?: Gideon Tax first, in both directions, and today for Form 1040. After that integration is mature, Keep is meant to import from and export to other DIY and professional tax software, accounting and payroll systems, and authorized tax AI, where technically and legally practical. Imports arrive with provenance and are never automatically authoritative.
Is my Keep sign-in the same as my Gideon Tax sign-in?: No, deliberately. Keep has its own sign-in, so a session at Gideon Tax opens nothing in Keep. You connect the two yourself from inside Keep, you can see what Gideon Tax has read and sent back, and you can turn it off whenever you like.
Can an AI assistant read my Keep?: No AI system has any access to Keep today. If that is ever offered, it will be only with your authorization, scoped by data category, action, duration, application and purpose. Reading a document, reading facts, suggesting a correction, writing one, preparing, authorizing, transmitting, exporting and deleting are distinct permissions. Text inside an uploaded document is never an instruction.
Does Keep give tax advice?: No. Verification is a software check against what Keep knows and against the document's own consistency — not an opinion on what you should claim. Whether an attribute may be used in a given year is decided by that year's law inside Gideon Tax, and the responsibility for a correct return stays with you and your preparer.
What if I delete my account?: Customer-owned Keep data can be deleted where legally and operationally permitted. Records Gideon must retain as an e-file provider, filing logs, compliance and payment records may have different retention rules, and Keep will tell you which is which rather than implying everything vanishes. There is no delete button in the application yet: write to privacy@gideonkeep.com and it is done by hand.