Personal CRM
Kept vs Clay (now Mesh)
Mesh — the personal CRM formerly at clay.earth, now owned by Automattic — builds a searchable network from your accounts. Kept builds a private record of what people told you.
What Mesh is
If you are looking for Clay, clay.earth now redirects to me.sh. The personal CRM has become Mesh, and the footer lists Automattic Inc. as the owner. Worth knowing before you compare against something under its old name.
Mesh describes itself as an AI navigator for your network. It syncs from Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Notion, WhatsApp and X, captures data from emails and meetings automatically, and runs on macOS, Windows, web, Android and iOS. Its AI layer is called Nexus.
The design centre is coverage. It wants to know about everyone you have ever been in contact with, assembled automatically, so you can search across the whole network.
Side by side
Where the record comes from
Kept
You say it. Nine seconds of talking after you see someone.
Mesh
Automatic sync from social accounts, email and calendar.
What gets stored
Kept
What you noticed — the things a person actually told you.
Mesh
Contact records, job changes, interaction history, meeting data.
Where it lives
Kept
On your phone. Notes are not synced to our servers.
Mesh
Cloud-synced across macOS, Windows, web, Android and iOS.
Platforms
Kept
Android today. iPhone on the waitlist.
Mesh
macOS, Windows, web, Android and iOS.
Who it is for
Kept
The twenty or so people you actually care about.
Mesh
Your whole network, professional included.
Streaks and scores
Kept
None, by design.
Mesh
Not something they advertise.
Mesh details checked on 15 August 2026 against their own site. Everything on this page about the other product was read off their own site on the date shown. We don’t list prices, because they change and a stale one would be misleading.
The difference that matters
Mesh answers "who do I know?". Kept answers "what did she tell me last time?". Those sound adjacent and they are not: the first is a coverage problem best solved by syncing everything, and the second is a memory problem that syncing cannot touch, because the fact that her second-round interview is on Thursday exists in no account anywhere.
That difference decides the architecture. A tool built on sync has to reach into your accounts and hold the result centrally. A tool built on what you noticed only needs the phone in your hand.
It also decides the scale. Mesh gets better the more contacts it holds. Kept does not — a hundred people is already more than anyone maintains, and a list that long is one nobody opens.
Where Mesh beats Kept
If your problem is genuinely professional — you meet a lot of people, you need to find the right one months later, you want job changes tracked without lifting a finger — Mesh does something Kept does not attempt, and does it across every platform you own. Kept has no sync, no desktop app and no search across a large network, and is not trying to.
Don’t pick Kept if: You want your contacts kept current automatically, you work across desktop and mobile, or you need this for work. Kept is deliberately small, manual and Android-only right now.
Why we built it this way
The design choices above aren’t preferences. Each one traces to published research, and each of these has its own page with the finding, the method and what it doesn’t show.
Keeping score is how exchange relationships work, and it damages close ones
Clark & Mills · Communal and exchange relationships
Messages known to involve AI are judged less authentic
Hancock, Naaman & Levy · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and subsequent AI-penalty research
Recording everything produced huge archives and nothing useful
Sellen & Whittaker (2010) · Communications of the ACM
If Kept is the one you want
Nine seconds of talking after you see someone. Kept files it against the right person and hands it back the day before it matters. Free for 14 days, no card needed.