Most home inventory apps either cost money, require an account, or push you towards a paid plan before you've added a single item. Here is how to build a proper inventory on your iPhone without spending anything.
A lot of apps are free to download but limit what you can actually do without paying. Before committing to one, it is worth checking a few things:
additem.to is free to download and use on iPhone with no item limit, no account required, and no expiry on the free tier. Photos, serial numbers, locations, NFC tag support, lending tracking, reports, and CSV import and export are all included at no cost. The free tier has limits on a few organisational features - 5 custom fields, 25 item tags, 2 kits, and 2 item templates - but none of these affect the core task of tracking your belongings. Cloud sync and the web app are available as a paid upgrade, but you never need them to use the core app.
The hardest part of building a home inventory is starting. The easiest way is to pick one room and spend 20 minutes on it rather than trying to do the whole house at once.
Open the app and create an inventory - you can call it "Home" or name it by room. Then start adding items. For each one, take a photo, enter a name, and add any details that matter: serial number, where you bought it, roughly what it cost. Don't overthink it - a record with a photo and a rough value is far better than no record at all.
Locations are one of the most useful features for home use. You can create a location for each room - Living Room, Kitchen, Master Bedroom, Garage - and nest sub-locations inside them. Kitchen can contain Cupboard, Fridge, and Counter. Garage can contain Shelving Unit, Workbench, and Loft Hatch. Assign items to whichever level makes sense, and browse by room or drill down to the exact spot.
Not everything in your home needs a detailed record. Focus on:
For lower-value items like clothing, books, or kitchenware, a rough category with an estimated total value is usually sufficient for insurance purposes.
The location feature is worth setting up properly. Locations support sub-locations, so you can go as specific as you need - Kitchen > Cupboard > Top Shelf, or Garage > Shelving Unit. Start with rooms, then add sub-locations for anywhere you store a lot of things. Items in storage areas are often the first to be forgotten and the last to be remembered after a claim.
Once locations are set up, you can quickly browse everything in a specific room, which is useful day-to-day as well as for insurance. "Where did I put the camping gear?" becomes a quick search rather than a memory test.
Tags let you group items across locations. Useful examples: "warranty active" for items still under manufacturer warranty, "seasonal" for things that are only out part of the year, "to sell" for things you are clearing out. You can create whatever tags make sense for how you think about your stuff. Lending items to people is handled separately by the built-in lending feature, which tracks who has what and when it is due back.
One thing most inventory apps miss entirely is lending. If you regularly lend tools, equipment, or other items to friends, family, or neighbours, it is easy to lose track of who has what - and harder still to ask for it back if you have no record.
additem.to has a built-in lending feature, free to use. When you lend something out, log it against the item: who you lent it to, when, and optionally when you expect it back. The item shows as on loan in your inventory until it is returned. No more wondering whether you lent the drill to your brother or left it in the garage.
One of the more practical features for home inventory is NFC tag support. You can buy a pack of small NFC stickers for a few pounds, stick one to a shelf or storage box, and then scan it from within the app to navigate straight to that location. Open the app, tap scan, hold your iPhone near the tag, and you are immediately in the right place to add or check items.
NFC stickers work well on shelves in garages and sheds, on storage boxes, on equipment cases, and anywhere you store things that move around. The app reads NFC tags natively - no extras needed.
An inventory you built last year and never touched is only useful if nothing has changed. The key to keeping it current is to add new items when you buy them, not in a periodic catch-up session you never quite get round to.
When you get home with a new laptop or camera, take 60 seconds to photograph it and note the serial number before it goes in a bag. This habit takes almost no time per item and means your inventory is always roughly current without any dedicated maintenance effort.
If you already have items listed in a spreadsheet, you can import them directly using a CSV file rather than entering everything by hand. You can also export your entire inventory to CSV at any time - useful for sharing with an insurer, keeping an offline backup, or moving your data elsewhere. Both import and export are free.
Yes - and it is worth being specific about what that means, because "free" covers a wide range of things in the App Store.
No ads. There are no ads on any tier, free or paid. You will not see banner ads, interstitials, or sponsored items in your inventory.
No account required. You can download the app and start adding items immediately. No email address, no sign-up screen, nothing. Your data stays on your phone.
No item limit. The free tier places no cap on how many items you can track. A home inventory can easily run to several hundred items - there is no point where the app stops you and asks you to upgrade.
No expiry. The free tier does not time out. There is no 14-day trial period after which features disappear.
No data collection. When you use additem.to without an account, we collect nothing - no item counts, no names, no analytics, no usage data. Your inventory lives entirely on your device. If you sign up for cloud sync, we store an encrypted email address so you can log in. If you access a shared inventory, you can optionally set a display name so other members can identify you. That is all we ever store.
What the free tier does limit. Every item comes with built-in fields for free: name, description, photos, location, status, item type, quantity, serial number, model number, manufacturer, category, barcode, purchase date, purchase price, and notes. The custom fields limit (5 on the free tier) is for fields you define yourself - things specific to your use case that go beyond the defaults. On top of that, the free tier caps tags at 25, kits at 2, and item templates at 2. For a standard home inventory these limits are generous enough that most people never hit them.
What the paid upgrade adds. Pro Local removes those limits entirely - unlimited custom fields, tags, kits, and templates - and works fully offline with no account needed. Pro Cloud adds everything in Pro Local plus sync across multiple devices and the web app. If you want to share an inventory with a partner, or access it from a laptop, Pro Cloud is the relevant upgrade. But for a single person tracking their own home on one phone, the free plan is genuinely complete.
additem.to is free on iPhone - no account required, no item limit, no expiry. Add items, photos, serial numbers, and locations, and organise by room.
Download free on the App Store