[HN Gopher] Show HN: HomeSheet - easy-to-use home inventory soft...
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Show HN: HomeSheet - easy-to-use home inventory software
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!
Author : fanieldanara
Score : 101 points
Date : 2022-04-05 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (homesheet.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (homesheet.co)
| Jayakumark wrote:
| Really liked https://www.thingybase.com/ , but no updates in
| recent times.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| vi home-inventory.txt
| [deleted]
| Nouser76 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| justinlloyd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| livelyar wrote:
| 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!
| whm wrote:
| 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.
| fanieldanara wrote:
| 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!
| ChadB wrote:
| 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!
| YeBanKo wrote:
| 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.
| gruturo wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| mrandish wrote:
| 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.
| pempem wrote:
| 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.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| 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.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| correct. all it takes is one meth head telling buddies that
| it's the google for free electronics -- a perfect pivot for
| when they go public and sell the data further down the
| line, might as well just SaaS that part now.
| mminer237 wrote:
| I don't think meth heads will be buying obscure datasets
| and sifting through them to find the optimal houses to
| burglarize.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Yeah I think for non-HN crowd this will hopefully save people
| time/money with insurance claims.
|
| 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).
| tryonlinux wrote:
| I haven't gotten around to adding the ability to store
| pictures yet or some other features. But this extensions is
| slightly similar if you use standard notes already for
| encrypted notes, this extension I created awhile ago might
| help from a privacy standpoint for those concerned. Also
| those who are concerned about a product going away/longevity,
| everything is plain JSON formatted text. (I.e why I created
| it).
|
| 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.
| EricE wrote:
| 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
| stochtastic wrote:
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| rootsudo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd be interested to see a built in OCR feature for book isbns,
| or games
| fanieldanara wrote:
| I'm definitely considering this, especially to enhance the
| in-app search for finding your items quickly. I like that you
| mentioned book ISBNs specifically as that's not something I
| had considered yet. Thank you for your feedback, I'll keep it
| in mind going forward!
| djbusby wrote:
| You could integrate with the entire UPC/GS1 database.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| FYI, most barcode readers just "type" the keys into the
| keyboard buffer or HID. You could literally just have a
| text input box (that honors enter key) to make it barcode
| enabled. Of course x-reference this info with something
| like the "what" database and you'd have great input.
| brimble wrote:
| I recall the "zbar" library being (relatively) easy to
| integrate and working damn well out of the box, on both
| iOS and Android, back in 2011 or 2012. I'd expect it's
| gotten even easier, if anything. It's been a while but
| IIRC you just find a way to hand it bitmaps from your
| camera, and it does the rest, spotting and decoding QR
| and bar codes.
| isuguitar12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cupofpython wrote:
| if the web app allows csv download, i dont see the issue.
| set up an automation to download a local copy every week or
| whatever.
|
| the download better be secure, but that's very doable
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Good luck accessing that data after a fire. Would be better
| to have the insurance company store it.
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's what cloud backups are for...
| fanieldanara wrote:
| This is insightful for the long term, good thinking! Thanks for
| your feedback here.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| michaelmior wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yhoiseth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback! Currently USD is the default (and
| only) denomination, but I will be adding support for other
| denominations in the future!
| fmajid wrote:
| It's neither open-source nor self-hosted. Pass.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Interesting concept? Yes.
|
| 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.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| 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.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| SashaSirotkin wrote:
| 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
| distracted_boy wrote:
| I use excel for this...
| kkfx wrote:
| 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?
| patrickserrano wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| linguistbreaker wrote:
| It would be cool if I could publish a subset of items available
| for use to my friends/neighbors. Privately(?)
| spants wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| widowlark wrote:
| 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
| open-paren wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| [deleted]
| pahn wrote:
| 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!
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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?
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