Why I built PubKeep.

Publisher ran in my family for as long as I can remember. My aunt had her own printing business for 45 years, and my mom worked there with her. Between them they had thousands of Publisher files. My aunt made everything on it: wedding programs, newsletters, menus, 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 was removing Publisher from Microsoft 365, and on October 1, 2026, it did. 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 didn't build this sooner.

I will be straight with you. I had not used Publisher much in years. I run a small software company, and between that and raising eight kids with my wife, I had drifted away from it. It was my mom who got caught off guard by the announcement, not me. She called and asked if I could help her, my aunt, and my cousin 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 was 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.

So I built it.

Before launch, more than 1,100 organizations signed up for early access, most of them churches. They opened their own bulletins and newsletters in it, sent me bug reports, and told me what was missing. One church secretary wrote that she got more done in 45 minutes than she had in other programs all week. On September 30, the day before Microsoft pulled Publisher from Microsoft 365, PubKeep went on sale.

What PubKeep is.

PubKeep is a desktop app for Windows and Mac that opens your .pub files so you can keep editing them, and keep making new ones. There is nothing to convert first. It opens the file you already have. You buy it once, and it is yours, no subscription. It saves to .pubk, an open, documented format, so you are never locked in. The Publisher you Keep.

And if all you need is PDFs of an old archive, the PubKeep Converter I first built for my family is still here.

It is for my mom, my aunt, and my cousin. It is for the church office printing bulletins and song sheets, the volunteer who makes the newsletter every month, 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.