Why we built PubKeep.

Publisher ran in my family for as long as I can remember. My aunt made everything on it: funeral programs and wedding programs, newsletters, labels, the family photo calendars we got every year. My mom and my cousin used it too. I used it myself, for things I still have: our wedding program, the thank-you cards afterward, the Christmas address labels.

None of us were designers. That was the point. Publisher had templates and it was simple, and it let ordinary people make something that came out looking finished. You did not have to learn a design app or think in layers. And it was yours. You bought it once, and it kept working.

Then the ground moved.

Microsoft announced it is removing Publisher from Microsoft 365 after October 2026. The tools everyone points to instead, Canva and Adobe, are genuinely good, but they are subscriptions that never end, and they do not open the files you already have. So millions of people with years of .pub files and a real investment in a tool they know were quietly told to start over, relearn everything, and keep paying forever.

Why I am only building this now.

I will be straight with you. I had not used Publisher much in years. I build software these days, and I had drifted away from it. It was my family who got caught off guard by the announcement, not me. They are the ones who reached out: could I help them get their files out before the app disappeared?

Honestly, I would have built this sooner if I had known sooner. But I was heads-down on other things, and the news reached me the way it reaches most people, through someone in the family who was about to lose their work.

So the first thing I built was the converter, a way to drop a whole folder of .pub files and get exact PDFs back, before Publisher is gone. That solved the urgent problem. Do not lose the past.

Here is what they wrote back:

The question that would not go away.

The more I looked at it, the more one question stuck with me: why should Publisher users have to stop publishing at all? Why not build a real replacement, one that opens the files they already have, works the way they are used to, and, this part matters most to me, comes with a license that respects them?

Not a subscription that holds your own work hostage. A perpetual license: you buy it once, and it keeps working, even if you never pay for another update. The way software used to be. The way Publisher was.

What PubKeep is.

It's two products, and they do different jobs. PubKeep Converter is the one you can use today. It turns your .pub files into PDFs you'll always be able to open, so nothing is lost when Publisher goes. Drop a whole folder, get exact PDFs back.

PubKeep is the one that comes next. The desktop app that opens your .pub files natively and lets you keep making new ones, bought once and yours to keep, no subscription. It saves to an open, documented format, .pubk, so you're never locked in. This is the product the whole thing is named for. The Publisher you keep.

The Converter rescues your past. PubKeep is how you keep going.

It is for my mom, my aunt, and my cousin. It is for the church secretary with fifteen years of bulletins, the small business with an archive it cannot lose, and everyone who put real time into a tool they trusted and does not want to relearn everything or rent their own files back.