Terms

Keepsake is small and free on purpose. These terms are short on purpose too — here's the deal, in plain language.

Who you're agreeing with

Keepsake isn't a company. It's one person: Kiarash Adl, an individual in Texas doing business as Keepsake. Where this page says "Keepsake," "we," or "us" — in "No warranty" below, in the indemnity, anywhere — it means him, personally, because there is no company standing behind the name for it to mean instead. That cuts both ways: the promises here are a person's promises, and the person who answers hello@keepsake.ing is the same one.

Where Keepsake is available

Keepsake currently serves the United States and Canada — the only two countries a listing can be posted in. It isn't available in the United Kingdom: the Online Safety Act asks every service like this one for a written safety assessment, a children's-access review, and a formal complaints process, real ongoing work we haven't taken on for a free project run by one person. We also block the Crown Dependencies — Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man — as the same UK-market judgment call, even though the Act's duties don't reach them directly. Either way the site answers a visitor with a short explanation instead of the product, and the block goes by the country your connection appears to come from, not by anything you tell us, so it covers browsing and requesting as well as giving. This may change; we'd rather say so plainly than pretend it isn't a choice.

Minimum age

You must be 18 or older to give or request anything on Keepsake. Each time you post a listing or ask for one, we ask for your date of birth and check it against that minimum before the post or the request goes through — a plain question rather than a box that states its own passing answer (what happens to that date afterward is in Privacy's "Minimum age" section). We can't verify anyone's age — this is still a self-declared limit, not an age-verification system, set higher than a typical content site's 13-or-so because Keepsake's whole premise is arranging in-person meetings between strangers, a different, higher-stakes thing than reading or posting content. If we learn — through a report, a listing, or a request — that someone using Keepsake is under 18, we'll remove the listing or request involved and, if it's a giver, ban their device key.

Gifting only, never sales

Keepsake exists to help people pass sentimental objects on to someone who'll love them. You may not use it to sell, auction, trade, or barter anything. If money or goods change hands off-platform in exchange for a listing, that's a use of Keepsake we don't allow.

You have to own it

Only post something you own outright and have the right to give away. Don't post on behalf of someone else, and don't post anything you found, borrowed, or don't actually have in hand.

Your photo and your words stay yours

You keep the copyright in the photos you take and the stories you write. Posting a keepsake doesn't transfer any of that to us, and it never will.

What you do give us is permission to run the site with it: to store your photos and words, show them on Keepsake to anyone browsing, make the smaller and cropped copies the site needs — a thumbnail for the feed, a share card for when someone sends a link to your listing — list the page in our sitemap so search engines can find it, publish the photo and a short excerpt of the story as structured data search engines can read directly, and turn your listing's public words into the numbers that make search work. That's the whole list, and it's the whole point of it: it covers running Keepsake and nothing else.

Not in adverts, not on another site, not licensed or sold to anyone — if we ever wanted to use a listing to show people what Keepsake is, we'd ask you first.

This permission lasts as long as your listing is up, and ends when you take it down. After that, copies drop out on the timetable the Privacy page describes rather than the same instant — and two things are genuinely beyond our reach once something has been public: a copy someone else saved, and a page a search engine has already cached. We can stop showing it. We can't un-see it for the internet.

The other half of this is a promise from you: the photo is one you took, or one you have permission to post, and the story is yours to tell. Don't post someone else's photograph of an object, even an object you own.

What's not allowed

• Anything illegal to give away where you live.
• Weapons, drugs, hazardous materials, live animals, or anything requiring a license to transfer.
• Contact details — phone numbers, emails, social handles, addresses — inside a story or title. Keep contact exchange inside Keepsake's request flow, where it belongs.
• Anything sexually explicit, hateful, or intended to harass.

Specific items — what's actually illegal versus what's just a bad idea

The table below spells out some categories in more detail, because we think a rule you can't check for yourself isn't much of a rule. The "Basis" column matters: where a row rests on an actual statute, we say so. Where it doesn't — where we're banning something because it's genuinely hazardous and unverifiable, not because a law says so — we call that a hazard-only rule instead of calling it illegal. A free bike helmet isn't illegal to give away, for instance; we still ask you not to, because we have no way to check its impact history, but we're not going to lie to you about why.

Item	Rule	Basis
Cribs made before June 28, 2011, and all drop-side cribs	Do not give away	Statute-adjacent — the CPSC's own written guidance says these "should not [be] resold, donate[d] or g[iven] away," interpreting the federal crib safety rules
Inclined sleepers and crib bumpers	Banned — do not give away, regardless of age	Statute (federal law, Pub. L. 117-126)
Used children's products with lead above federal limits (except metal jewelry)	Generally fine once used, unless you actually know it violates the limit	Statute (15 U.S.C. §1278a(b)(7) exempts used children's products from lead limits even when donated)
Children's metal jewelry (used)	Do not give away without verifying lead content	Statute — carved out of the exemption above
Car seats	Allowed — disclose age and any crash history in your listing	Hazard-only. Not federally restricted once first sold; we ask for disclosure because we can't verify crash or recall history ourselves
Helmets (bike, sports)	Allowed — disclose age and any impact history in your listing	Hazard-only. No law restricts giving these away; we ask for disclosure for the same reason as car seats
Radioactive antiques (vaseline glass, some Fiestaware)	Allowed — note "not for food or drink contact"	Statute — exempt under federal regulation (10 CFR §§30.15/40.13)
Weapons, ammunition, explosives	Do not give away	Statute, varying by item and jurisdiction — several categories require a licensed transfer wherever you are
Drugs, controlled substances	Do not give away	Statute (federal and state controlled-substances law)
Live animals	Do not give away through Keepsake	Hazard-only (we can't verify care, transport, or welfare); many places also have their own animal-transfer statutes
Recalled products generally, beyond the categories above	Do not give away if you actually know about the recall	Hazard-only, modeled on the "actual knowledge" standard federal law uses above — not itself a statute

One row above deserves an extra word of honesty: the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's own published guidance says its rules reach "people holding yard sales and flea markets" and that people who give away used products for free "cannot knowingly sell or give away products that do not meet the requirements of the law." No court has actually decided whether that reach extends to a free, one-to-one platform like this one — it's the regulator's stated position, not a settled legal fact, and we're telling you that distinction rather than dressing up an untested claim as certain.

We may remove listings

Every listing is screened before it goes live, and anyone can report a listing that's already up. We may remove a listing, decline to publish it, or ban a device key, at our discretion, with or without explanation.

If you think something here is yours

If a photo or a piece of writing on Keepsake is yours and you didn't agree to it being here, write to hello@keepsake.ing and we'll deal with it. One person reads that inbox, so it goes straight to someone who can act.

To save a round trip, tell us in the first message:

• The link to the listing, and which part of it you mean — the photo, the words, or both.
• What the work is and where we can see that it's yours, if there's somewhere to point at.
• Your name and a way to reply to you.
• That you believe in good faith the use wasn't authorised by you, by your agent, or by law — and that what you've told us is accurate and you're the rights holder or speaking for them.

What happens then: we hide the listing while we look, we tell the person who posted it what was claimed and by whom, and they get to reply. If we're wrong, it goes back up. We would rather take a listing down for a day and be mistaken than leave someone's photograph up over their objection.

And a standing rule, so it isn't decided case by case: if the same person keeps posting work that isn't theirs, we ban the device key that posted it, the same way we would for anything else on this page. Repeating it is the thing that gets you removed.

Meeting up safely

A keepsake means a stranger comes to a door or a meeting spot for something that often means more to the giver than an ordinary object would — which makes the ordinary rules for meeting someone from the internet worth repeating here, not just assuming you know them:

• Meet somewhere public and well-lit — a coffee shop, a store entrance, a police department's designated exchange spot if your town has one. Not your home, and not theirs, especially the first time.
• Bring a friend, or tell someone else the time and place before you go.
• Keep the conversation inside Keepsake's request messages for as long as you can, instead of moving straight to text or a phone call — it's a smaller thing to hand a stranger than your number, and it keeps a record either of you can point back to.
• No-contact counts as meeting up. If either of you would rather leave the keepsake on a porch, with a neighbor, or at a front desk than meet face to face, say so in your note or your reply — that's a normal way to use Keepsake, not an awkward one.
• If anything about a planned meetup feels off, you can back out. That instinct is worth more than a sense of obligation to a stranger you agreed to meet.

This is guidance, not a substitute for your own judgment about a specific person or place — see "No warranty" below.

If you're giving something away: you cover us for what happens between you two

We're borrowing this arrangement from Olio, a comparable giving platform that runs the same one-directional structure: the giver carries this risk, not Keepsake or a requester.

No warranty

Keepsake connects people; it doesn't inspect, authenticate, or guarantee anything about the items listed. Keepsakes are given "as is." We're not responsible for the condition of an item, whether a handoff happens smoothly, or what happens after you meet up. Use good judgment when arranging to meet a stranger — see "Meeting up safely" above for what that looks like in practice.

The most we can be on the hook for

Your device key — there is no password

There's nothing to log into here: no username, no password, no profile. The first time you post something, your browser generates a private key and keeps it in that browser's storage on that device, and sending it with each request is the whole of what proves a listing is yours. Clearing your browser storage, using a private window, or moving to another browser or another device leaves that key behind — and without it we have no way to prove a listing was yours.

The one way back is the email you gave while posting, once you have verified it. Ask for a recovery link at keepsake.ing/recover and we'll mail one to that address; opening it issues a fresh key to the browser you opened it in and retires the old one immediately, so a device still holding the previous key stops working at once. Without a verified email on file there is no recovery path at all — that isn't a limitation we can waive for you, it's what a key only your browser holds costs.

If you asked for a keepsake rather than gave one, you have no key and no dashboard at all — the confirmation email we send you, and the withdraw link inside it, are your only handle on that request. What withdrawing does and doesn't undo (a giver who'd already chosen you is the one case it can't touch) is in Privacy's What a requester shares.

Changes

We may update these terms as Keepsake grows. When we do, the new version replaces this page, the date at the top of it changes, and — since September 2026 — what moved gets written down below. There's no notification and no mailing list: we hold your email address to tell you about your own listing or your own request, and we don't use it for anything else — this page included. If these terms matter to you, the date at the top is what to check, and the list under it is what to read.

What changed

9 September 2026. A copy correction; no clause changed meaning. "Your device key" was headed "there is no account" and repeated the claim in its first sentence, which stopped being a fair description on 8 September, when an email address became required to post a listing. The heading now says "there is no password", the section says there is nothing to log into rather than that there is no account, and the recovery paragraph names the address you were already asked for rather than one you might have added. "Changes" no longer explains the absence of a change notice by saying there's nobody to notify — we do have your address; we simply don't use it for this.

8 September 2026. Four corrections, found in a legal-copy pass over this page and fixed the same day. "Where Keepsake is available" no longer credits the Online Safety Act with the Crown Dependencies block — the Act's duties reach Great Britain and Northern Ireland, not Jersey, Guernsey, or the Isle of Man, and the Dependencies block is stated as the separate UK-market judgment call it actually is. The Consumer Product Safety Commission coda now quotes the agency's own wording exactly, including "knowingly," which changes what the quoted rule says. And "Your photo and your words stay yours" now names the schema.org structured data — the photo and a story excerpt — that search engines can already read, which the licence grant had left out.

8 September 2026. A condensing pass, on top of the corrections above: no clause changed meaning, but several said less to mean the same thing. "Who you're agreeing with," "Minimum age," and the paragraph for someone who only requested (under "Your device key") each drop a sentence of restated context; the last of those now points at Privacy's fuller account of what withdrawing does. "device token" — a slip in two places where the rest of both pages says "device key" — is fixed to match. The content licence grant drops a redundant "we don't use it elsewhere" sentence, which is what made room to add the structured-data disclosure above without the section growing. The prohibited-items table's Basis column loses filler words that didn't change what any row asserted, keeping every citation and every statute-vs-hazard-only label intact. And the "we don't guarantee this" idea, previously stated in three places, now has one home — "No warranty" — with "Meeting up safely" and the indemnity's Olio paragraph pointing there instead of repeating it.

8 September 2026. Three additions, all of them things this page should have said from the start rather than changes in how Keepsake works. "Your photo and your words stay yours" is new: you keep the copyright, and what you give us is a narrow permission to run the site with your listing — store it, show it, make the thumbnail and the share card, list it for search engines, index its words — which ends when you take the listing down. Until now this page said nothing at all about the photos and stories people upload, while the site did every one of those things. "If you think something here is yours" is new too, and gives a copyright complaint somewhere to go and a described response instead of a general inbox. And "The most we can be on the hook for" adds a $100 cap on what Keepsake can owe you, alongside the disclaimer that was already here — the one genuinely new limit on this page, which is why it's boxed and why it says plainly what it doesn't cover. Alongside them, the governing-law section now also says where a disagreement is heard, keeping small claims available where you live.

Governing law, and where a disagreement goes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If something between us ends up in court, it goes to the state or federal courts sitting in Harris County, Texas, and we both agree to that.

With one exception, because the rule above shouldn't turn a small problem into a plane ticket: you can always bring a claim in small claims court where you live, if it belongs there. We'd much rather hear from you at hello@keepsake.ing first — one person reads it, and most things end there.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Write to hello@keepsake.ing.