Introducing KeyDog: Key & Door Management Built for Campus Facilities

Today we are making KeyDog generally available.

KeyDog is a key and door management platform for the people who run campuses. Schools. Colleges. Healthcare facilities. Municipal sites. The kind of operation where there are hundreds or thousands of physical keys, dozens of doors, several layers of staff turnover per year, and a binder somewhere that is supposed to keep track of all of it.

This launch comes after eighteen months of design, three months of paid pilots, and roughly nine hundred hours of conversations with facilities directors, security supervisors, and administrative staff. It does not solve every problem in physical access. It does solve the operational problem of who has what right now, and whether you can prove it.

Why we built it

My background is in operating complex physical systems — semiconductor fabs, manufacturing plants, capital projects. I have spent a lot of time in rooms where someone needed a specific tool, a specific record, or a specific signature, and where the answer to "where is it" was either "I do not know" or "let me check the binder."

The binder is always wrong. It is wrong because it is maintained by a human under time pressure, and because the person who knows what is actually in it left two reorgs ago. Every operational discipline I have worked in eventually replaces the binder with a system that is honest about state — that knows the difference between the model of reality and reality itself, and that captures every change to either one.

Facilities teams have not had that system for physical keys. Most of the access control market is focused on electronic credentials — readers, controllers, badge management. Physical keys, which are still the dominant access mechanism for the majority of doors on the average campus, get treated like a leftover problem. The answer has been "use a spreadsheet" or "buy enterprise security software that was designed for the federal government and costs accordingly."

We do not think those are the only options. KeyDog is what sits between them.

What KeyDog actually does

KeyDog is not access control hardware. It does not sit on the wire between a reader and a door. It is the system of record that tells you, for every physical key and every door on your campus, who is responsible for it, who has the right to use it, and what has happened to it over time.

The core modules:

• Physical key tracking. Every key is a record. Every issuance, return, and status change is an event in an immutable log. Automated reminders go out for overdue keys without anyone having to chase.
• Door management. Every door has a record — the hardware that is installed, the fob profile that applies, the access level, the building, the floor plan pin. When the hardware is replaced, the change is captured.
• Fob profiles. Electronic access mapped to people, doors, and zones. When somebody leaves, you can see exactly which profiles they held without cross-referencing the access control system against HR.
• Audit trail. Every action taken in the system is captured with the user, the timestamp, the resource, and a plain-language description. The log cannot be edited from inside the application.
• Staff and safe management. Combinations, system credentials, and access PINs live in role-gated records. Reveals are logged.
• Key agreements. PDFs that auto-populate from the issuance record, get signed, and live with the transaction.
• Floor plans. Upload the building plan. Pin the keys and doors to it. New staff can find their way without learning your numbering convention.

That is the surface. The deeper design choice is that everything is built around the audit log. Every other surface in the application is a view of events that have happened. You cannot change the past in KeyDog — you can only add new events.

Who it is for

We built KeyDog for a specific kind of organization:

• You manage at least one building. Probably several.
• You have somewhere between a few dozen and a few thousand physical keys in active circulation.
• You have a mixed environment — physical keys on most doors, electronic credentials on the high-traffic or high-security ones.
• You have to answer audit questions. Maybe from a regulator, maybe from insurance, maybe from a board.
• You have lost track of at least one key in the last year. Most teams who talk to us have lost track of many more than that.

If you are in this position, KeyDog is built for you. If you are running a small office with twelve keys and three doors, you are probably fine with what you have. If you are operating a federal-grade SCIF, you need more than we offer.

How to try it

Pricing starts at $49 a month for the Starter plan, which covers one building, three admin seats, and the full core feature set. The Campus plan is $199 a month and covers up to five buildings with the full add-on stack. Pricing details are on the pricing page.

There is a live demo you can poke at without signing up — it is loaded with a synthetic community college and shows every module the way a real customer would see it. If you want to talk to us about your specific environment, our sales team is one form away.

This is the start. We have a road map that runs through mid-2027, most of which came directly out of pilot feedback. We will be shipping continuously, and we will be writing about what we ship here. Thanks for reading. We are glad you are here.