We are proud to announce the release of Under My Roof! What initially started as a rewrite of Home Inventory to add sync and native iOS support ended up morphing into something much more than that, hence the new name.
Under My Roof expands upon what Home Inventory offers for creating and maintaining a catalog of your belongings, including many highly requested features such as: improved data entry, better navigation, sub-locations and sub-categories, unlimited custom fields, more flexible custom field types, asset tagging, improved multi-currency support, color-coded tags, and of course sync and native iPhone and iPad versions alongside the Mac version.
The Stories Behind The Stuff
Some things are just special. Maybe it’s something that was passed down from a loved one, has a storied history, or maybe it’s something you’ve modified to make it your own. Under My Roof offers a variety of tools to capture these stories. From the ability to add photos and create notes (with optional dates) on just about everything to storing documents, receipts, repair histories, and modification/renovation histories, you can use Under My Roof to record these stories. We wanted to build a practical app, with a personal touch.
Repairs & Modifications
Under My Roof lets you keep track of repairs and maintenance, as well as modifications and renovations for you home, locations (rooms), collections, and items. You can store cost information and contractor details, as well as notes, receipts, photos, associated warranties, and documents for each repair or modification entry. You can even keep track of the parts and supplies used.
Maintenance Schedules & Warranties For Everything
Where Home Inventory allowed you to create a maintenance schedule for your home, Under My Room extends this to almost everything. You can now create maintenance schedules for items, collections, and even locations. The consolidated maintenance schedule shows you all of the upcoming maintenance tasks for your home and everything in it.
Moving Boxes
If you are moving, Under My Roof will help you keep track of what’s in each of your moving boxes and where they end up being stored after your move. If you’re anything like us, it may take years before everything is fully unpacked. You can add custom barcodes and QR codes to your boxes that you can scan with the camera on your iPhone or iPad to lookup the contents of a particular box.
Robust Claims Support
One of Home Inventory’s strong suits is the ability to enter your insurance policy and coverage information and use it to determine if you have enough coverage for your belongings. Under My Roof includes all of those features with the addition of claims tracking. You can use it to create a list of damages, expenses (such as cleanups), and attach documents, photos, and receipts regarding your claim. You can also create notes so all of the relevant information is readily available in one place as you navigate the often cumbersome claims process. And it’s not just property insurance, either. You can use Under My Roof to keep track of any kind of insurance claim: health, automobile, and so on.
Privacy Is Paramount
We are a software company and our business is selling software. It never has, nor ever will include selling customer information. Your inventory data is private and we do not have access to it. It remains on your device(s) and, should you enable syncing, in your private iCloud account. You can choose to share your inventory with family members and others via iCloud sharing, but whether or not you do so and who you share it with is entirely up to you.
Pricing and System Requirements
Under My Roof is a subscription-based application and we’ve done our best to keep the price as low as we can at $19.99 (USD) a year or $2.99 (USD) a month. You can try it for free to see if it works for you. You can download Under My Roof from the App Store or Mac App Store.
Under My Roof requires iOS 14 or later for the iPhone and iPad and macOS 11 (Big Sur) for the Mac. Syncing requires an iCloud account with enough free storage to store all of your inventory data.
Subscriptions – Why!?!
So why can’t we just offer Under My Roof as a pay up-front app like we did with Home Inventory? The simple reason is that model just wasn’t working anymore. We haven’t charged for an upgrade in the 10+ years Home Inventory has been in the Mac App Store. While it has continued to sell, those sales were steadily declining year over year, which was very much in line with what we’ve heard from other developers of paid up-front apps.
In order to keep it going, we needed a more viable revenue model. And since the vast majority of our sales came from the Mac App Store, it had to be a model that worked within the framework offered on Apple’s app stores while remaining simple enough that it did not have a significant impact on future feature development for Under My Roof (Binary Formations has always been just two people). So while we understand the frustration many will have with this choice, it really came down to a choice between moving to subscriptions or shutting down the company. We have been producing Home Inventory for over 15 years and would like to see Under My Roof be around for even longer.
Is Home Inventory Going Away?
Currently, there are no plans to stop supporting Home Inventory. We would like to release updates to keep it running on the latest OSes for the foreseeable future and barring some unforeseen circumstance, that is what we will do. If Home Inventory works for you, you can keep using it as long as you want. There will be no additional charges to do so. However, we sincerely hope you give Under My Roof a try. We’re really proud of it and think you will find it useful.
Sincerely,
Diane & Kevin Hamilton
Binary Formations, LLC