Building Hometric

Our first release is a home inventory app. That sentence has never impressed anyone at a party, and that's roughly why we chose it.

When we started Baran Labs, we made a list of problems that are real, unsolved for most people, and boring enough that they aren't crowded with venture-funded competitors. Home inventory sat near the top. Everyone with home or renters insurance is supposed to have one. Almost nobody does. The people who try mostly quit halfway through the second room, because the existing answer — a spreadsheet, or an app that is a spreadsheet with a nicer font — asks you to type your life into a form.

The unsolved part wasn't awareness. It was effort.

The bet: photos, not forms

The bet behind Hometric is that the phone's camera plus modern image understanding can collapse the effort to nearly zero. You photograph a room; the app identifies what it sees, estimates what each item would cost to replace, and organizes the result by room. If that works, the inventory stops being a project and becomes a walk through the house.

Making it work honestly was most of the job. Image models are confident, and confidence is not accuracy. We spent much of the build on the unglamorous middle layer: letting you correct what the AI got wrong, showing values as ranges instead of false-precision numbers, and tracking documentation health per room so the app tells you what's still missing rather than congratulating you for opening it.

The export came first

The design decision we'd defend hardest is that the PDF export was designed before most of the screens. A home inventory has exactly one moment of truth: the day you hand it to an insurance adjuster. So we started from the document that moment requires — items, photos, values, serial numbers — and worked backwards. Every screen in the app exists to make that document more complete. Features that didn't serve it didn't ship.

That's also why Hometric does something inventory apps usually don't: it reads your coverage. Enter your policy's limits and it will tell you where your inventory total stands against them, which category sub-limits — jewelry, electronics — you might exceed, and which single items probably need scheduling. The point of knowing what you own is understanding whether you're covered for it.

What shipping taught us

Hometric reached the App Store in July 2026, for iPhone, in the United States and Canada. Between the first working build and the version that shipped, most of what changed was subtraction. Early builds tried to do more — more screens, more numbers, more cleverness. Each round of real use pushed us back toward the same three questions a homeowner actually has: what do I own, what is it worth, and am I covered?

The other lesson was about pricing. Hometric is paid — a free month, then $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year — and we were told more than once that a free tier with ads would grow faster. Probably true. But an app whose entire job is a detailed, photographed record of the inside of your home should not be funded by advertising, and we'd rather grow slowly than explain that trade-off away. If you stop paying, your inventory stays viewable in the app, and you can request a full copy of your data at any time. That's the deal, stated plainly.

Hometric is on the App Store now, and there's a longer look at how it works here. If you try it and something's wrong, tell us — a person reads every message.