Why we built an offline-first inventory app
When we started on HomeHero, we made a call that looked odd for a modern app: it would work without the internet.
You don't make an account, nothing gets uploaded, and there's no "you must be online to continue" screen. The app runs on your device and keeps your data there. That wasn't a corner we cut to ship sooner. We chose it on purpose, and the longer we run HomeHero, the surer we are that it was right.
The trouble with cloud-first apps
Most home inventory apps go the same way. You download the app, make an account, and your data goes up to someone else's servers. That's fine until it isn't.
If the company shuts down, your inventory can go with it. If their servers are down for maintenance, so is your list of belongings. Some apps cope with a lost signal better than others, but the copy that counts still lives on someone else's machine.
None of this is hypothetical. Services shut down all the time, startups run out of money, and big companies kill products. If your data only exists on someone else's infrastructure, you're renting access to your own information.
Your home, your data
A home inventory is about as personal as data gets: photos of your valuables, serial numbers, what things are worth, and where they're kept. If it leaks, it's a shopping list of what's in your house.
Most inventory apps put all of that on servers you don't control, often under terms that give them broad rights to use it. That struck us as a strange trade for a tool that's meant to help you protect your things.
What offline first means here
Offline first doesn't mean "never online". It means the app does its job without a connection, and the internet adds things on top.
In HomeHero that works out like this. Your data lives in a database on your device, so when you add an item or take a photo, it's saved right there and nothing has to reach a server. The Android and Linux apps work in the basement, the garage, a cabin or a plane. (The web app needs a connection to load, then keeps your data in the browser.)
Sync is something you turn on. If you want the same inventory on several devices, with a copy on our servers, it costs a small monthly fee, and your data travels over HTTPS. Without an account, your inventory never leaves your device.
Keeping everything local also makes the app quick. You don't wait on a spinner for a server to answer, and you don't see "failed to connect".
Why the free plan has no cloud
This part confuses people. They see "no cloud" on the free plan and assume it's there to push them toward paying. We see it the other way round.
If your data isn't on our servers, it can't leak from our servers, and it can't disappear if we do. It's a database on your device, and you're in charge of it.
There's a real trade-off, though. If your inventory lives only on your phone, losing the phone means losing the inventory. That's what Sync is for, if you want it. Plenty of people are happy with an inventory on one device, with no account, no password and no email address involved.
Free first, paid if it helps
The usual model is to lock useful features behind a paywall or a sign-up screen and then talk people into paying. We went the other way.
The free plan is a full inventory app with no item limit, no time limit and no nag screens. We want people to use it, depend on it and trust it.
If you later want sync across devices, that's $2 a month. If you want AI to draft items from a photo or a product link, that's $5 a month. Both are things that genuinely cost us money to run. We didn't carve them out of the free app to create pressure.
We think the best way to earn a customer is to be useful first and ask for money second. If the free app solves your problem completely, we count that as a win.
Try it
HomeHero runs on the web, Android and Linux. The free version has no item limit and no sign-up. If keeping your inventory on your own device sounds right to you, give it a try.
Wondering how that compares with an app built around a cloud account? Our HomeHero vs Sortly comparison goes through it.