Keywitch — which key is this?

The problem

Keys arrive without labels. Constantly.

The handover pile

A landlord hands over a bag of keys for the front door, the deadlock, three windows, the garage, the letterbox and a shed. Nothing is labelled, and working out what’s what becomes your problem.

The inherited key box

A management transfers from another agency. The keys arrive in an envelope with the old agency’s tags stripped off — sometimes off the ring entirely. No register, no context, no idea what opens what.

The bottom of the drawer

Every office has one. So does every house. A box of keys accumulated over years of tenancies, renovations, lock changes and moves — some of them copies of each other, none of them labelled, and nobody willing to throw any of them out.

What Keywitch does

It reads the cut pattern, so you don’t have to squint.

Photograph the key

Lay it flat, take a photo. Keywitch finds the blade, works out where the cuts start, and measures the pattern.
It checks your library

Against every key you’ve already enrolled. Same cut pattern means the same key — even if it’s a different physical copy, on a different ring, from a different year.
You get a record

Name it, tag it, file it in a folder, add notes. Next time that key turns up, it already knows.

Bulk enrolment lets you photograph an entire key box — or an entire drawer — in one session.

For businesses

Built for the businesses that hold other people’s keys

Barcode fobs and electronic key cabinets are good at telling you where a key is and who has it. They work because someone attached a numbered fob to that key on day one. Keywitch handles the keys that arrived without one — identify them first, then track them however you already do.

Property managers and agencies get handed unlabelled keys constantly: at every new management, every tenancy change, and in bulk whenever a rent roll transfers from another agency. Locksmiths match and identify keys as the job itself rather than an occasional chore. Storage facilities, strata managers, schools, councils and facilities teams sit on key populations that have outlived the people who knew what they opened.

What these have in common isn’t volume — it’s uncertainty. Keywitch turns a box of unidentified keys into a searchable library your whole team can see, so the answer to “have we got a spare for this one?” stops depending on who’s in the office that day. Keys enrolled by one person stay visible to the rest of the team, so the library survives staff turnover — which is usually when key knowledge gets lost in the first place.

Storing key data for other people’s properties raises fair questions. Here’s exactly what Keywitch stores and how it’s protected →

See business pricing →

For households

Sorting out the keys at home

Most houses have more keys than locks. Keys from a previous owner, keys from a tenancy that ended, keys for a window that was replaced, keys cut as spares and never labelled. They accumulate in a drawer or a tin, and nobody throws them out because nobody can be sure what they open.

Photograph the lot in one session. Keywitch groups the duplicates, so you find out you’re holding eleven distinct keys rather than twenty-six. From there you can work out what’s worth keeping, label what you keep, and throw out the rest with some confidence.

You still have to test the ones you keep against your own locks — nothing can tell you what a key opens from a photograph. But testing eleven keys is an afternoon. Testing twenty-six is why the tin is still in the drawer.

Before a house sale or a move. Know what you’re handing over, and hand it over with a record.
Keys loaned to family, a cleaner, a house-sitter or a tradesperson. Confirm what came back is what went out.
A holiday house, a shed, a storage unit, a boat. Keys you touch twice a year and forget in between.
After a renovation. New locks, old keys, and a pile that no longer maps to the house.

Set it up once and leave it. Your library stays there for the next time a key turns up that nobody recognises.

Pricing

Keywitch is free while it’s in early access, and every account has every feature. Anyone who signs up during early access keeps access to what they’ve enrolled.

When paid plans arrive

Free

No charge

Enough to see the whole thing work, end to end.

One key stored
Photograph as many as you like
Every photo compared against that key

Business

Monthly, by key ceiling

Priced by how many keys you need to hold, not by how many properties you manage — a rent roll of four hundred shouldn’t cost four hundred times a rent roll of ten.

A key ceiling you choose, and can raise
Folders, tags and search across the whole collection
Shared libraries for a team, as an add-on

Households — a one-off payment, up to 25 keys. See what it covers →

Weighing this up for a team? Get in touch at support@keywitch.com.au.

Questions

Questions people ask

Will it recognise a key I had cut somewhere else?

Yes. Keywitch matches on the cut pattern itself, so a spare cut years later at a different shop still reads as the same key. That’s the whole point — a duplicate is recognised by shape, not by anything attached to it.

Can I photograph a whole drawer at once?

Yes. Bulk enrolment is built for exactly this: photograph the lot in one session, and Keywitch groups the duplicates as it goes. A box of forty often turns out to be half that many distinct keys.

Do I still need tags and a key cabinet?

Yes, and Keywitch is better with them. It doesn’t replace physical organisation — it makes it trustworthy. Your tag says what the key opens; Keywitch confirms the key is the one that tag belongs to.

Who uses Keywitch?

Property managers and agencies, locksmiths, storage facilities, strata and facilities teams — and households sorting out a drawer of keys nobody can identify. Anyone holding keys whose identity is uncertain.

I’ve only got about thirty keys. Is that too small?

Not at all. A drawer of thirty unlabelled keys is exactly the job Keywitch is quickest at, and it’s usually done in one sitting.

We can usually tell keys apart by looking at them.

For obviously different keys, absolutely — and for those you won’t need this. The case that catches people out is two keys cut from the same blank with slightly different patterns, which is exactly what a duplicate looks like and exactly what’s hardest to judge by eye.

Can it tell me what lock a key opens?

Keywitch tells you whether two keys are the same, which is the part that can be worked out from a photograph. What each key opens is something you record against it once — and from then on it’s attached to every copy of that key you enrol.

What about properties that are keyed alike?

That’s the ideal setup, and Keywitch is most useful for everything it doesn’t cover — windows, mailboxes, garages, sheds, and the properties you’ve inherited from another agency with no idea what was keyed to what.

If someone copied a key and gave the original back, would it know?

No — that’s a genuine match, and Keywitch will say so. It detects a substituted key, not a copied one. Worth knowing where the line is: it confirms you got back the key you handed out, not that no copy was made along the way.

Will I need to keep paying after I’ve sorted my keys out?

Not if you’re a household. There’s a one-off option for exactly this reason — it’s a job you do once.

What happens to my data if I stop using it?

You stay in control of it. Delete any key, or close your account, and the photos and measurements go with it. Backups expire within 30 days.

Where to start

Start with one drawer.

The key box at the office, or the tin in the kitchen. Photograph the keys nobody’s touched in three years and find out how many of them are the same key. It takes twenty minutes.

Start free