A weekly day of rest, designed so that stopping feels like arriving — not like giving something up.
Who it's for
Picture a thirty-one-year-old who is culturally Jewish but doesn't keep Shabbat. Their phone is a genuine comfort. They've installed the screen-time limits and ignored every one of them. They aren't looking for more Judaism — they're looking for a calmer, better-shaped week.
Common Era builds for people exactly like this: the roughly seventy percent who feel a cultural connection but have no institution serving it. The brief was pointed — start with the human problem, not a religious one. Build something people are drawn toward, not nagged into. And leave them thinking: “I had no idea Judaism had something to offer me here.”
The insight
Screen-time tools are bouncers. They block, shame, and count your failures. That posture was exactly wrong for someone who already feels nagged by their own devices.
So the whole product was built around a single reversal: ceasing should feel like a destination, not a denial. You don't lose your phone for a day — you gain a day that is set apart. Keep is the kind adult who helps you set a table, never the coach or the disappointed parent.
What it is
Keep isn't an app you check. It's a small ceremony with a beginning, a middle you spend away from the screen, and an end.
You decide what you're setting down, when, and why — in your own words. The screen quietly darkens as you go, like dusk settling.
Your promise comes back to you as a small printed keepsake, bordered by your own words. Something you'd actually want to share.
At sundown, two flames. The moment is meant to feel unmistakably different from a notification — a threshold, not a reminder.
When it's over, you mark it yourself. A single tile is laid into a growing mosaic — a quiet record that the week left a mark.
The design philosophy
Before a single screen was built, the team wrote down what Keep believes. Everything else bends to these.
The candle screen is a place you reach, not a gate you pass through. Rest is framed as somewhere you get to be.
The most beautiful thing on screen is always the person's own words — their intention, their promise — never decoration around an empty label.
Nothing is measured, logged, or surveilled. You tell the app you kept the day; your word is the only record. This is a feature, not a shortcut.
The flame is a made thing, not a photo of fire. Pattern and geometry over literal illustration. When in doubt, suggest rather than depict.
Screen by screen it grows quieter — less clutter, larger type, the color deepening from parchment toward night. The design itself performs the crossing into rest.
This page you're reading obeys the fifth law. It began on parchment and is descending, with you, toward night.
“Trust, don't track” isn't a privacy setting. It's the reason the whole thing feels human.The one rule that defines Keep
There are no accounts, no analytics, no counting of your slip-ups. Observing Shabbat was never something to be surveilled — it's a matter of trust. Keep simply extends the same trust to you.
How it was made
Keep was made in a two-day sprint. The trick to moving that fast without losing the plot was to settle the hard questions — the tone, the beliefs, the exact words — before building anything.
That written foundation acted like a constitution. Several builders could then work in parallel, at speed, and none of them had to guess at voice or intent — it was already law. When the client's feedback landed midway through, the product could change the same afternoon without unravelling, because everyone was building toward the same fixed idea.
Where it landed
With more time A walkthrough film, real sundown alerts on your phone, and — the north star — the sense of your single flame among many, once genuine presence can be earned rather than faked.
The candles are lit.
The day is set apart.
Keep · a Common Era × Signalform Studio project · common-era-keep.pages.dev