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

homesheet.co

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

#41

Post by justinlloyd »

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.

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

#42

Post by ChadB »

whm wrote: post #27

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 hav…

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!

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

#43

Post by stochtastic »

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.

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

#44

Post by rootsudo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

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.

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.

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

#45

Post by tryonlinux »

spacephysics wrote: post #18
gruturo wrote: post #15

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 sa…

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).

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.

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

#47

Post by azinman2 »

isuguitar12 wrote: post #37
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

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.

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,…

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.

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

#50

Post by sarchertech »

justinlloyd wrote: post #41

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…

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.

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