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AI home inventory vs. a manual spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is genuinely free and gives you total control — this isn't about pretending it's a bad option. The honest comparison is about what actually gets finished. Most home inventories built as a manual spreadsheet get abandoned after the first room, because typing out every item, brand, model, and value by hand is tedious enough that people put it off indefinitely — and an unfinished inventory helps you exactly as much as no inventory at all.
| Spreadsheet | Home Inventory Scanner | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free trial, then paid per scan session |
| Time to complete an average home | Realistically: never — most people start and abandon it | One walkthrough, roughly the time it takes to walk through your home once |
| Item identification | You type every description, brand, model by hand | AI identifies items, brands, and model numbers automatically from the footage |
| Value estimates | You look up or guess every value yourself | Real price lookups where a brand/model is identifiable; AI estimate as a labeled fallback |
| Depreciation / current value | Manual math, if you do it at all | Calculated automatically, with the full working shown — see depreciation rates |
| Photo evidence | Only if you separately take and file photos yourself | A real photo of each item is captured as part of the same walkthrough |
| Keeping it updated | Requires you to remember and manually edit rows | Rescan a room; matched items stay, new ones are added, missing ones are flagged |
| Works completely offline forever, no account needed | Yes | No — needs an account and, for AI analysis, a connection |
| Full control over the exact format | Yes, it's your file | Exports to PDF and CSV, but the underlying format is this app's |
If you already have a spreadsheet you've genuinely kept up to date, this app has nothing to offer you — you're already ahead of most people. If you have a half-finished one, or none at all, you can import what you already have and fill the rest in with a walkthrough instead of typing the remainder by hand.