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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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We may disclose personal information to:
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* our employees, contractors, and/or related entities
* our existing or potential agents or business partners
* third parties to collect and process data
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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.
Major security risk? Oh heck yes.
Privacy policy that basically sells you down the rive? You becha.
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.
How could you convince me that the data will always be properly safeguarded?
If it is a common concern I imagine the company could offer an encrypted option where the cloud data is never plaintext.
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.
But for privacy conscious people, I don’t see anything they could say to have me trust them. Nothing against HomeSheet in particular, but we don’t have any assurances that the data will not be sold (acquisition style).
https://github.com/tryonlinux/Home-Inventory-sn
disclaimer: Not trying to take away from this product, as I feel it definitely serves a purpose and market that my extension doesn’t cover and vice versa.
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.
this way you can build a community consensus on top of whatever youre able to data-mine
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.
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!
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).
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.
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!
Thanks!
Thank you for your feedback!
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.
- 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!
As for a source of revenue--have you contacted insurance companies to see if they might be interested in providing it to their customers?
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
Your app looks great, what's your tech stack/any design system you use?