Personal CRM
Kept vs Dex
Dex consolidates contacts from your accounts and reminds you to stay in touch. Kept records what people told you and brings that specific thing back.
What Dex is
Dex is a personal CRM. It syncs from LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Outlook, auto-updates job titles as your network changes, and runs on iOS, Android, web and a browser extension.
It stores how you met someone, important dates and event history, and sends keep-in-touch reminders so relationships do not go quiet. Its stated privacy position is that it is subscription-funded rather than ad-funded and will not sell your data.
Of everything in this category, Dex is the closest in spirit to Kept — it is aimed at real relationships rather than at sales, and it does not advertise AI message drafting.
Side by side
Where the record comes from
Kept
You say it, out loud, in about nine seconds.
Dex
Sync from LinkedIn, Gmail, Calendar and social accounts, plus manual notes.
What the reminder says
Kept
The detail, anchored to a moment: "Maya's interview is Thursday — ask on the bus home."
Dex
Keep-in-touch reminders based on how long it has been.
Where it lives
Kept
On your phone. Notes are not synced to our servers.
Dex
Cloud-synced across iOS, Android, web and extension.
Platforms
Kept
Android today. iPhone on the waitlist.
Dex
iOS, Android, web, browser extension.
Does its AI write your messages
Kept
Never. The AI transcribes and files; the words are yours.
Dex
Not something they advertise.
Streaks and scores
Kept
None, by design.
Dex
Keep-in-touch cadences per contact.
Dex 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
The real split is what a prompt carries. Dex tracks time since last contact and tells you when it has been too long. Kept tracks what was said and gives you that back. One tells you that you are overdue; the other tells you what to say.
This is not a preference. Deciding in advance when and where you will do something has a medium-to-large effect on whether you do it, and a prompt that names a moment and a specific thing to say is closer to that structure than one that reports an elapsed interval.
There is also a quieter difference. A cadence is a ledger — it is counting your inputs. The research on communal versus exchange relationships is fairly direct about what happens when ledger machinery gets applied to close relationships, and it is the reason Kept holds needs and details but never displays who is owed a message.
Where Dex beats Kept
Dex does the contact-management job properly and Kept does not do it at all. If you want one place where every contact is current, deduplicated and synced back to your address book, across desktop and phone, Dex is built for that and Kept has no answer to it. It is also on iOS today, which Kept is not.
Don’t pick Kept if: You want your address book maintained, you work across several devices, or you want an explicit cadence per person telling you when you are overdue. Kept refuses that last one on purpose.
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.
Deciding when and where you’ll do something roughly doubles the odds you do it
Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) · Implementation intentions and goal achievement
Keeping score is how exchange relationships work, and it damages close ones
Clark & Mills · Communal and exchange relationships
Measuring an activity makes people enjoy it less
Etkin (2016) · Journal of Consumer Research
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.