What to Look for in a Free Home Inventory App
Updated August 1, 2026
Most free home inventory apps limit you by item count — commonly between 25 and 250 items — which a furnished home passes within a few rooms. Before committing to one, check the item cap, how many photos you get per item, whether you can export your data if you leave, and whether it works on the devices you actually use. The cap is the constraint that matters most, because an inventory you cannot finish is not much use.
"Free" carries a lot of weight in this category, and it usually means something narrower than it sounds. Most free home inventory plans are trials in disguise: generous enough to get you started, capped low enough that a real house hits the wall partway through. That is a fine business model, but it is worth knowing before you spend a weekend cataloguing. Here is what to actually check. (Fair warning: we make one of these, so read this as a checklist rather than a neutral ranking — the questions below are the ones we would ask regardless of what you end up choosing.)
Check the item cap first
This is the number that decides whether you finish. Free tiers in this category commonly cap somewhere between 25 and a few hundred items. A furnished family home, catalogued at the level that is actually useful for insurance, runs to several hundred — so a 25-item cap covers roughly one room. Find the cap before you start, and be honest about how far it gets you.
Photos are the other quiet limit
Photographs do more work than any other field at claim time, and they are often where free plans tighten. One photo per item is workable but thin; you usually want the item, the serial number, and the receipt. Check how many photos per item you get, and whether photos count against a storage limit as well as an item limit.
Can you leave with your data?
You are about to invest real hours in this. Before you do, check that you can export it — as a CSV, a spreadsheet, or a document — and that deleting your account is something you can do yourself. An inventory you cannot get out of an app is an inventory held hostage, and this is the question people most often forget to ask at the start.
Does it run where you actually are?
- You catalogue on your phone, standing next to the thing
- You review and tidy on a laptop, sitting down
- So it needs to work properly on both, with the same data
- App-store-only tools strand you if you switch phone platforms
- A browser-based app sidesteps that entirely
What actually earns money in this category
Knowing how these products make money tells you where the walls will be. Some charge for capacity — the item cap is the paywall. Others give away capacity and charge for the things you need at claim time: receipt and document storage, a formal PDF export for your insurer, sharing with family. Neither is wrong, but they produce very different experiences, and the second lets you finish the job before deciding whether to pay.
The test that matters more than any feature list
Ask one question: will you still be updating this in a year? Every inventory decays — things get bought, sold, broken, and given away — and a stale list is worth a fraction of a current one. The app that keeps you updating is the one where adding something takes ten seconds from your phone. Feature comparisons rarely capture that, and it is the thing that decides whether any of this was worth doing.
Where Stowly sits
We built Stowly around the capacity question, because we think that is the wrong place for a paywall: unlimited items and unlimited rooms are free, with no credit card, along with photos on every item, warranty and return tracking with reminders, and stocktake mode. It runs in any browser, so there is nothing to install and the same inventory opens on your phone and your laptop. Paid plans add receipt and document storage, the insurance-ready PDF, CSV export and import, and household sharing — the things you want once the inventory exists, rather than the permission to build one.
Frequently asked questions
How many items does a home inventory actually need? More than most people expect. Cataloguing at a useful level — anything you would want replaced — a furnished family home typically runs into the hundreds.
Is a free plan enough? It depends entirely on where the cap sits. If capacity is free and the paywall is on exports and receipts, a free plan can genuinely cover you until you need to make a claim.
Can I move between apps later? Only if you can export. Check for CSV or spreadsheet export before you start, not after you have entered four hundred items.