Show HN: HomeSheet – easy-to-use home inventory software

Show HN: HomeSheet – easy-to-use home inventory software(homesheet.co)

156 points by fanieldanara 4 years ago | 81 comments

Hi HN!

I've spent the last few months building HomeSheet - The all in one tool to track your personal assets. I built HomeSheet to make organizing and documenting my belongings a breeze. I've always wanted to put together a home inventory to protect myself in the event of a disaster, but I never found a solution that I liked.

Right now HomeSheet is in early access, and I'm still working on determining what additional features users would like. I'll be around in the comments if you have any feedback, questions, or just want to say hi!

justinlloyd 4 years ago |

It looks interesting. I congratulate you for making it. It will be a cold day in Hell before I tell some random corporation the detailed contents of my home which may or may not get data-leaked, sold to another company (yeah! yeah! you pinky promise to "never" do that), partners with external service providers to either sell me something I don't want, data mine what I have or use it to determine if I am a credit risk, or ultimately the entire shebang gets purchased by BigMegaCorp that ties it into a whole bunch of other data points.

Nobody in their right mind would say "my home has an $XX,000 handbag in it" to a private corporation that doesn't have a whole bunch of safeguards in place. There's a reason I keep all of our insurance records in a safety desposit box at the bank. For home insurance you itemize the more expensive items and then have enough general household contents insurance to cover everything else.

sarchertech 4 years ago | |

Databases already exist to provide enough info to target your house. For most people that don’t have million dollar paintings, the likelihood of an attack or a leak of a national database attracting more the thieves than the general property value of your house is extremely low.

Also those “more expensive items” and the more general coverage limits are already in insurance company databases, and I wouldn’t bet on them being any more secure than a random SaaS startup.

oliwarner 4 years ago | | |

But no random consumer analytics company is going to buy Visa or Amazon and all their data for six or seven figures, or whatever this would be valued at after a couple of years.

Why is it worth anything? The users of this system are the people with enough to lose. Top-1%ers. With deep metadata stored about their purchasing habits. The direct marketing and informatics value would be immense.

I'm with the GP and many other comments here. This data is valuable, both against you (in targeted marketing and theft) but also to you. You should collect this data, store it yourself, offline, in a safe with those other documents and keepsakes you could never ever replace. It's the same process. It's probably easier on a bit of paper too.

justinlloyd 4 years ago | | |

I disagree, in part, with your conjecture, but am not in a position of authority to back up my refutation of your claims. That said, a database that knows we spent $17k on the AMEX last month doesn't know _what_ we spent those dollars on. I could be extremely fat and enjoy expensive takeout food.

TimTheTinker 4 years ago | |

Your comment makes me wonder if something like 1Password would be a better candidate for tracking household goods. You could trust it as much as you're willing to trust it with passwords.

I imagine clicking "New Item > Catalog" (which could create an in-vault Sqlite database). Perhaps they could also build a plugin system for third parties to provide nice-looking, domain-specific front-end UIs for tracking various types of things in 1Password.

Vaults can be up to 1GB in size -- more than enough for personal text data and relatively small images.

YeBanKo 4 years ago |

Great idea, but it seems like Facebook for your personal items. Brief look at the privacy policy:

  However, if necessary, we may retain your personal information for our compliance with a legal, accounting, or reporting obligation or for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific, or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.
  ...
  We may disclose personal information to:
  ...
  * our employees, contractors, and/or related entities
  * our existing or potential agents or business partners
  * third parties to collect and process data
  ...

No, thank you.

chillingeffect 4 years ago | |

In the old days this would be a pc "program" on a person's home computer and all this data sharing concern moot. Why this database madness? All that's needed is a simple encrypted cloud backup. Harrumph.

legalcorrection 4 years ago | |

I think you're reading too much into that. All that means is that they can use other services to process your data, e.g. putting your data in an AWS managed database.

toomuchtodo 4 years ago |

Consider on your roadmap a white label option for companies that might want to offer this service to customers (home insurers, primarily, although I'm sure there are other use cases). Longer sales cycle, but more recurring revenue, more sticky, less price sensitive. Charge enough to make it worth your time, but not so much that a non-tech/biz person would try to gather resources together to build it in house.

isuguitar12 4 years ago | |

American Family Insurance used to offer an app for this called DreamVault (https://appadvice.com/app/dreamvault/536354802). They discontinued it in 2016 shortly after I put my whole house inventory into it of course. It had enough features to make it useful but wasn't very impressive overall. There may be some perverse incentives in NOT having this service for home insurers. If you don't have a good home inventory, they can pay a reduce reimbursement amount.

azinman2 4 years ago | | |

This is why I would never trust a hosted web app to do something like this. I fully expect my house to last much longer than any such company. I’d want an app I run on my computer with data that I can export to something time lasting like CSV/PDF/etc.

rootsudo 4 years ago | |

Whitelabel is great, especially for apartment complexes and such, I can see this item being popular if a landlord wants to enforce renters insurance and such and even for airbnb/short term rental hosts that have 5+ properties, you want a place to easily look up receipts, condition, depreciation, and be able to share how old something is when a guest breaks something / to debate if it's worth to charge the guest. If a TV breaks, but it cost $300, and it broke 4 years, it's most likely yeah lifetime to replace, if it breaks in less than a year, and most likely not from user being rough, easy to get the receipt do a warranty repair, etc.

Meanwhile, I also am surprised how easy of an app can be so wanted, I solved this for myself, just to see how many things I buy/what to sell them for/depreciation for tax time (since it's for businesses.) in one spreadsheet.

greggsy 4 years ago | |

I’d be interested to see a built in OCR feature for book isbns, or games

ShakataGaNai 4 years ago |

Interesting concept? Yes.

Major security risk? Oh heck yes.

TOS that basically take all content and allow them to do/sell it however they please? Totes.

Any mentions of encryption? Not a one.

Sorry, no thanks. Maybe if it was open source, run it yourself. But a hosted app to give away the data (remember, if it's free - you're the product) on my house hold goods... to be sold to the lowest bidder? No way.

gruturo 4 years ago |

I understand the SaaS model (after all, if my house burns down, I don't want the inventory to burn down with it), but this is an advertiser's (and a burglar's !!) wet dream. Any current commitments to safeguarding my privacy could be reversed in your future T&C, or you may be acquired (User data included) by a company with wildly different priorities.

How could you convince me that the data will always be properly safeguarded?

mrandish 4 years ago | |

That's a potential objection that didn't occur to me. I think the reason why is that the vast majority of home break-ins and burglaries aren't premeditated. They are addicts seeking stuff they can quickly sell for cash or random crimes of opportunity. Not criminal masterminds or international jewel thieves.

If it is a common concern I imagine the company could offer an encrypted option where the cloud data is never plaintext.

jimmygrapes 4 years ago | | |

I believe it's the availability of the information (or lack thereof) that contributes to the low rate of intentional burglary. Addicts and opportunists don't generally know ahead of time which place has what stuff worth stealing, for now. If that data was available to them somehow, they might be more choosy, and you'd also increase the type of premeditated burglary that is currently kept low by the risk/reward balance leaning strongly towards risk.

pempem 4 years ago | | |

Where did the data underlying that point come from?

There are organized rings of burglary and they come and go over time. Off the top of my head I can think of three or four that I personally have been exposed to including of course the one that had its own netflix special, the bling ring.

Nouser76 4 years ago |

One interesting use case to me would be cataloguing features of an item you own. When you are dealing with insurance, they will reimburse you for a product of like kind and quality. For example, if you have an older consumer stand mixer that uses metal gearing instead of plastic gears (like lots of modern consumer stand mixers), then they might be forced to give you a check to buy a commercial stand mixer that does have metal gears. Adding more features typically means you will get a better payout to replace it - you get Venn diagrams of functionality that only an expensive replacement will fully cover.

I'd love to put in a product code and import functionalities of that product. The data integrity and seeding might be tricky to pull off, but it'd become extremely valuable for anyone going through insurance.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

This is a very interesting use case I hadn't considered. I think seeding and getting a working database of these types of attributes would be an incredibly large task, but I definitely see the value in being as specific as possible here. This may be a good opportunity for some user education on how to document their belongings, what types of attributes to note, etc. I'll keep thinking on this, thanks for your feedback.

cupofpython 4 years ago | | |

this can be something where SaaS model works in your favor. Allow people to manually input qualities for an item, and then when someone else inputs the same product code it suggests those qualities to them

this way you can build a community consensus on top of whatever youre able to data-mine

open-paren 4 years ago |

I've only read the landing page, but I'm instantly very interested in this. I've recently been looking for a product or solution just like this as part of my emergency preparedness goals.

Some questions:

1) I know that homesheet.co is currently free, but what are you considering for pricing options?

2) What are my data export options? No offense, but products on HN are a dime-a-dozen and this is the kind of data that I don't want to lose if you get too busy to work on the product.

I'd love to see encryption included as a feature. I know you say that you don't sell the data and that it's "mine", but I want to make it impossible for you, since privacy policy can change at any time.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

Thank you for your interest! Happy to address your questions:

1. HomeSheet is currently free so I can gauge user interest and receive user feedback (Like yours, which I appreciate so much). After the early access period, I'm considering an annual subscription, and likely a free tier. This all depends on the infrastructure costs, etc moving forward.

2. I'm committed to a PDF export option to generate visual reports of your items. This isn't quite ready yet but it's in the works! Currently, I am able to provide a sqlite export of your data and a zip of your assets via a support request at this time, but I would like this export option directly in the app so it is available to you 24/7.

Encryption is an interesting use case I haven't considered yet. I'd be happy to explore what this would look like. My first thought would be to allow for client side encryption of any documents attached to your items, so things like vehicle registrations, bill of sales, etc. would all be encrypted client side. This is something I'll have to explore more, and likely would be added at a later date. I'm definitely interested though!

kingcharles 4 years ago | | |

I'm scared to use it right now, put all my items in, and then the pricing is obscene later and I've wasted all my data entry...

candiddevmike 4 years ago |

Looks interesting, too bad it's SaaS only? Kudos on the no ads bit though. If you're looking for something that can be self hosted, checkout snipe-it: https://snipeitapp.com/

For a more all-in-one household data solution that can also be self hosted, checkout Homechart: https://homechart.app.

I would be interested in working with you (contact info is in my profile).

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

Thanks for sharing! SaaS only for the time being, but that could change in the long run. I'll send you an email, let's chat :)

tristor 4 years ago |

So, here's the thing, I would love to use something like this. This is an area I've been trying to address with various spreadsheets for years along with crudely drawn floorplans. The biggest issue for me, is that whatever solution I go with, MUST export to an editable spreadsheet format (export to XLSX preferred).

For me, this is the type of information I want to export to multiple storage places for backup, and keep a printed copy in my fire safe. Not just in a SaaS. I'm perfectly fine paying for a SaaS service (if reasonably priced, no more than $5/mo for an individual), but I need these export options or I'd never sign up. Holding my data hostage is a non-starter.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

I hear you loud and clear! This is the type of information I think everyone should have in their fire safe. The PDF reporting feature I'm working is great for the print it and put it in the fire safe use case. I've also come to learn that many others are interested in spreadsheet exports, too. This is a use case I want to not only support, but also encourage.

I can provide sqlite exports of your data via a support request at any time, additional export options are a priority for my next release cycle. If you want to shoot me an email at daniel@fanara.co, I'd be happy to reach out and let you know when these features go live!

Ricapar 4 years ago | | |

The PDF export feature sounds great - but even something simpler like a CSV, JSON, heck even XML would give others a lot more freedom to handle the data however which they choose.

spants 4 years ago |

Looks interesting... 1) Verification email went to spam on google 2) Values are in USD - what about the rest of the world? 3) Will need an export to csv rather than just pdf

Thanks!

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

Thanks for letting me know about the verification email going to spam, I will look into this. Other currencies are in the works! I'm considering other export options and I'll note your vote for CSV!

Thank you for your feedback!

whm 4 years ago |

I have been working on something similar for the generic 'collector of XYZ' type group.

This looks quite nice and I do like the 'simplicity' of the interface.

One of the issues I've come across is the different uses people may have for this. A home inventory could be a 'simple' list of objects to one person, but to another they might want to have a number of bits of metadata for the item. For instance, a TV might have a number of HDMI ports, has a resolution etc. It might be worth looking at ways to add custom fields to items, either from a template or manually for each item.

I'd also suggest looking at how you can expose a log of who looked at what, when. Including on the database side of things. As someone else pointed out this is a gold mine of information for anyone nefarious, or an advertiser.

One thing I worked on for my project (which I'm not sure i'll ever get round to finishing) was a way to have a label that matched up with an entry on the site. QR Codes are 'ugly' but can work quite well for this. A short domain + a non base10 number for ID and you're off to the races.

A potential way to monetise this might be to work with insurers, I dont know much about the insurance market, but I'd assume they'd love to be able to put actual values and the like on someones household goods. Perhaps theres an avenue that insurers offset, or indeed pay outright, for users that meet certain criteria. Theres some prescience set for this in the UK with LeakBot, a number of insurers will offer customers this for free, as they are able to get information about a leak from that system. I'm not sure if it's shared with the insurer or not, but its something to explore as a possible revenue stream.

ChadB 4 years ago | |

I'm also working on a similar product, but targeted toward small businesses (https://assetbots.com/). I agree that the simplicity is nice here. I've done a lot of customer interviews and demos at this point, so here's my free advice:

- Custom fields are a must.

- An IRL link (an "asset tag") is nice, but honestly not critical, even for most small businesses. This changes as users become more accustomed to having an inventory.

- Users say they want hierarchies but they almost never do in practice (e.g., nested folders or containers).

I'd love to chat inventory product design any time. Feel free to email me (my email is in my profile). Good luck!

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

I appreciate your perspective from already creating something similar, I'll consider this moving forward. More verbose audit logs are a great idea and I'll add that to the feature board, thanks!

michaelmior 4 years ago |

One feature which seems obvious enough that you're probably already considering it is the ability to share my inventory with other users. It would be nice if I could share this with my spouse without having to share login information.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

Thank you for your feedback, this is in the pipeline but won't be ready until a later date. This is definitely a use case I have considered and would like to address.

ale42 4 years ago |

Thanks for sharing this! The idea seems very nice, but why should this be hosted on a third-party server? I want to keep my data for myself... the title is misleading, this is not a software but a service!

yhoiseth 4 years ago |

Looks great! I entered a value for an item, and it was automatically denominated in USD. The amount I entered was in NOK. How can I change the currency? I checked the profile page, but I couldn’t find it there.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

Thanks for your feedback! Currently USD is the default (and only) denomination, but I will be adding support for other denominations in the future!

LorenPechtel 4 years ago |

Should be available as an app so we can use the phone camera to take pictures directly.

As for a source of revenue--have you contacted insurance companies to see if they might be interested in providing it to their customers?

kkfx 4 years ago |

Nice idea, but consent a question: this web-app do home inventory, and home inventory only, another do bank transactions record and stocks and them only, another is only a webmail + webcalendar, ... ALL not integrated not easy to integrate despite with classic modern poor man's solution (many WebVM tabs open and cut&paste) witch is the very same limitation of classic modern desktop applications.

In the past, a far past, such limitations, walls, walled gardens, have not existed. An operating system in the past was a single application, with a "common layer" witch is what we can call base system + base userland and countless of variations any users, yes users, not developers, can made.

How many here think it's about time to came back to such model? Modern applications both desktop GUIs and WebUIs are like they are for commercial purpose, not by nature, Plan 9 GUIs, Xerox GUIs, LispM GUIs in different time in history were NOT like that.

Personally I try to re-create such classic desktop in Emacs and it's does work, even if in a spaghetti manner, for instance my "agenda" is not really a dedicated app (it's org-agenda, but for me it's just a collection of notes with scheduled/deadlines/todos in them + various catchall), so mails are not used via a dedicated UI isolated from the rest (I use notmuch, but accessing mails via org-mode links, like notmuch-search:tag:unread, so mails are linked in relevant notes, and those notes (org-mode/org-roam managed/accessed) "link" attachments, comprehend inventory, transactions, mails, metadata, ... all integrated and filtered in various way (plain search&narrow like org-roam-node-find, org-ql queries, ...).

Long story short: who do not know what I describe in the above paragraph, didn't you feel the missing integration in modern tools? For those who know instead: why we keep even in FLOSS land such modern/archaic model?

livelyar 4 years ago |

Nice work and congrats on the early access! I've been working on a very similar idea (https://getbo.app) for the past year-ish and funny enough am also located in Columbus. Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking about this!

stochtastic 4 years ago |

Yay! For years I've been wanting some form of home-oriented fleet management tool for all of my stuff. I'm glad you've addressed maintenance reminders — I am so bad at keeping track of things like bike chain replacement and cabin air filter changes. Looking forward to trying this out.

tylerrobinson 4 years ago |

Funny coincidence to see this. As a still-somewhat-new homeowner, I've faced similar pain points. When did I change the furnace filters... and what size are they, anyway? What was the model number of the downstairs faucet aerator? Who did I call last summer when the AC went out?

But like other commenters, my ideal solution would be a physical book! You have none of the privacy issues, no subscription, and no reliance on a vendor that might not exist decades from now. I searched for home maintenance logs, but I couldn't find one that was very much better than a spiral-bound stack of copier paper.

I'm thinking of making one myself. If anyone else interested in buying a copy or helping make it a reality, email in profile. I still want one!

HALtheWise 4 years ago |

I've been using a simple Google Sheet to track my personal inventory for a while now, and have basically all of my rarely-used possessions indexed. The biggest benefit is that I need to put way less effort into having a "sensible" organization scheme, since I can just throw something into "Tub D" and not worry about being able to find it later.

The one key tip I'd recommend is setting up your system to resolve nested containers. For example, Tub D itself might be in your coat closet. It doesn't look like this system is really set up for that, although my use case is also quite different than what it's targeting with insurance.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

I really like this idea and the idea of knowing exactly where all the rarely-used possessions are. Admittedly, this is a little bit outside of HomeSheet's use case, but I'll certainly keep this perspective in mind.

SashaSirotkin 4 years ago |

If directly appealing to insurance does not work commercially, you may find success looking at museums and other curator-type businesses. That niche is fairly profitable even if it is difficult to get into

jeroenhd 4 years ago |

This is great! The features are all quite useful and the UI looks very friendly. Even better, the TOS and privacy policy will surely annoy and upset people enough to develop an open source competitor so if this catches on, we'll get an even better open source version down the line!

I'll be keeping an eye out for the inevitable open source competitor that'll be slightly worse but much more popular among geeks. Until then, I'm definitely staying away from something this bad a deal.

Jayakumark 4 years ago |

Really liked https://www.thingybase.com/ , but no updates in recent times.

patrickserrano 4 years ago |

Looks really interesting! It'd be awesome if I could import data via CSV or connection to other sites. I know it's a bit of an edge case but as an example, I'm a vinyl nerd and have my collection catalogued on Discogs. It'd be great to be able to pull that data in here to keep everything centralized so it's easy to access in the event of an insurance claim or the like.

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

Syncing between websites is certainly a long term feature that isn't quite on the roadmap yet, but data exporting certainly is. Right now I'm committed to PDF reporting, and I can also provide you a sqlite copy of your data via a support request (Although I am working to make this option available to users 24/7). I've also had others mention the desire for a CSV format, so I'll also be sure to think that one over as well. Thank you for your feedback!

account-5 4 years ago |

I've done this with a very simple MS Access database, I originally did it in a spreadsheet. I'm going to move it to an SQLite dB with a TCL/TK front end (learning the language) eventually.

At no point would I ever put this information online in the care of a third-party company.

I have no idea why everything needs to be online??

Well done on the product though.

fmajid 4 years ago |

It's neither open-source nor self-hosted. Pass.

pahn 4 years ago |

I'm not the type of person who would maintain such a catalogue, but thinking about the scenario: I'll take 15 min tomorrow to run through my flat and just photograph everything. That way, in case disaster strikes (knock on wood it never does!), I do have some proof and only have to do the tedious cataloguing when it's actually needed… so, thanks i guess!

lkxijlewlf 4 years ago |

This looks interesting. I have a question to those who use it.

I work from home and I have a good bit of stuff from my work (RFID readers, LIDAR, computers, web relays, etc) that I want to catalogue in case something happens to me and my SO needs to differentiate between what is ours and what is works. Would this be a good piece of software to do that?

fanieldanara 4 years ago | |

I'll let anyone else chime in if they would like, but I wanted to note that Collections would be a good use case for this. If you add all of your work gear, you can add it to a "Work Assets" collection, that would be tagged on all of those items.

linguistbreaker 4 years ago |

It would be cool if I could publish a subset of items available for use to my friends/neighbors. Privately(?)

jcwayne 4 years ago |

The ability to add location and an Alexa skill to allow me to ask Alexa where my foo is would be great.

Chetane 4 years ago |

Congrats, looks interesting. For higher value items and furnitures, I currently have a spreadsheet with price, and screenshots of product specs. Very useful when time comes to sell them :)

Your app looks great, what's your tech stack/any design system you use?

casenjo 4 years ago |

This looks like a great solution, congrats on the launch! I don't know if I would store that information in the cloud though. If you were to offer a self-hosted option I would be all over it.

EricE 4 years ago |

I made something like this in Hypercard years ago. The biggest problem wasn't the lack of software to track things, but putting everything in the app and then keeping it up :p

lloydatkinson 4 years ago |

Very interesting. Might want to consider adding some of your own colours to your tailwind config though, I can tell it's all taken from the Tailwind UI service.

syngrog66 4 years ago |

vi home-inventory.txt

widowlark 4 years ago |

I have made essentially the same thing as this offering within Notion - I wonder what the value add is outside of what I have already created

Andaith 4 years ago |

Super interesting concept, and it looks great. Good work! but for something like this I'm either self hosting it or nothing.

XCSme 4 years ago |

Why would I use this instead of writing it in a text document/sheet/piece of paper?

distracted_boy 4 years ago |

I use excel for this…

However, if necessary, we may retain your personal information for our compliance with a legal, accounting, or reporting obligation or for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific, or historical research purposes or statistical purposes. ... We may disclose personal information to: ... * our employees, contractors, and/or related entities * our existing or potential agents or business partners * third parties to collect and process data ...