HomeCubbieComing soon to iPhone and Android
Your house, on your phone. Not on our server.
HomeCubbie keeps the facts of a home: what is in it, what needs doing, and what is insured until when. It works with no signal, there is nothing to sign up for, and we don't have a server to put your house on.
Works with no signal
Everything lives on the phone, so a basement, a plane or a dead zone changes nothing.
Nothing to sign up for
No email, no password, no account. Open it and start with your first room.
Shared on your terms
A household that shares runs its own small server at home. We never see it.
What it keeps
A house is a hundred small facts you only need once a year
HomeCubbie puts each one where you will look for it, and tells you before one of them matters.
Places
Every room, and whether it's kept up
Open the kitchen and everything about it is there: the Things in it, what needs doing, and what was done — by whom, and for how much.
A ring around each room shows how much of what came due in the last thirty days was kept up, and stays open while anything is late. The house has one too, at the top of Now, with a sentence that says which rooms need you.
Things
Who fixed it last time, and what it cost
Open the fridge and you get the whole story: how old it is, whether it is still under warranty, what you have spent on it, who came out last time, and the filter that needs changing next.
A repair goes in as an Event on the Thing it happened to, with the Person who did it and the receipt attached. A year later it is still on the fridge — not in a drawer, an inbox, or a photo roll.
Policies
The renewal you didn't see coming
A Policy has a term, an end date and what it cost last time, and HomeCubbie tells you before it runs out, not after — with the policy number and the claims line right there. Car insurance, home insurance, a registration, an extended warranty, a service plan.
Reminders are scheduled on your phone, so they arrive with no server anywhere in the loop.
Costs
What the house really costs
Every bill, premium and repair adds up in one place, month by month and year by year: the electricity, the property tax, the insurance, the plumber.
It compares this year with the last, and says what is coming: the renewals ahead, with what each one cost last time.
Notes
Where the water shutoff is, at two in the morning
The House manual holds the facts with no date attached: which wall the shutoff valve is behind, which breaker is which, who to call when it floods. Written down once, by the person who found out.
The touchy ones — alarm codes, key safe numbers — stay hidden until you tap to reveal, and the app can be locked behind your face, fingerprint or passcode.
Getting started
Start with one room
No account and no long setup. Choose whether the house lives on this phone or with your household, then add a room.
Add a task there and HomeCubbie offers the upkeep a room like it usually needs, from more than 250 common household tasks, each with a schedule and a time estimate. Tap the ones that apply. Nothing is added until you say so.
Then fill in the rest as it comes up: a Thing when it needs fixing, a Policy when the renewal arrives, a Note when you find the shutoff.
Less typing
It reads the paperwork, right on the phone
The slow part of any record is copying numbers off paper. HomeCubbie reads them for you, and you check before anything is saved.
Bills
Attach a bill's PDF or photograph the paper one, and its period and amount are filled in for you to check.
Serial plates
Photograph the plate on the back of the furnace and get its make, model and serial number.
Say when
Type twice a year
, every fall
or the first Saturday
of the month
, and that becomes the schedule.
Search inside documents
Find the manual or the warranty by the words printed in it, not just by its name.
"It looks like…"
Photograph a page and HomeCubbie suggests what it is — a Policy, a bill, a receipt, a manual — and says why, for you to confirm.
Share it in
Share a PDF or a photo from your email, your files or your photos, and it waits in HomeCubbie to be filed.
All of it happens on the phone. Nothing is uploaded to
be read. On iPhones that have Apple's on-device model, Search can also
answer a question — where is the water shutoff?
— from your own
records.
The promise
No account, because there is no server of ours
Most apps in this category ask you to sign up first. HomeCubbie has nothing to sign up to. Your house lives on your phone and, if your household shares, sealed on your household's own server. Nowhere else.
- No sign-up, no sign-in, no password, no email address
- No cloud of ours, and no copy anyone at HomeCubbie can read
- No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, no trackers
- No network at all, unless your household shares — and then only to its own server
That last one is not a promise about intentions. One file in the app can reach a network, and it talks only to the server your household sets up. The app's test suite fails the build if any other code, any dependency, or any web address that could leave the phone is added.
Yours to keep
If HomeCubbie ever disappears, your records don't
Out of the box, HomeCubbie makes a backup every week and keeps it on the phone. Save a copy anywhere you like — a drive, a cloud folder of your own, another phone — or, on Android, pick a folder once and every weekly backup is saved there too.
A readable copy, whenever you want one. Export the whole house as plain pages: one for every Place, Thing, Policy and Account, with its files beside it, plus the House manual and the history. It opens on any computer, without HomeCubbie.
The backup itself is a plain .zip, on
purpose: a short manifest, one text file per kind of record,
and your documents beside them.
├── manifest.json ├── tables/ │ ├── property.ndjson one record per line │ ├── policy.ndjson │ ├── event.ndjson │ └── … one per kind └── documents/ ├── 9f2c8a… your files └── e3b0c4…
Also in the box
The small things that make it a habit
Reminders on the phone
Tasks and renewals remind you with notifications scheduled on the phone itself.
App lock
Lock it behind your face, fingerprint or passcode. While it is locked, the app switcher hides what is on screen, on iPhone and on Android 13 or later.
Documents and photos
Manuals, receipts and warranty cards sit with what they belong to, and photos open in a viewer that zooms.
People
The plumber, the insurer, the handyman: call them from the app, copy their email, and see when they were last here.
A year in review
Step through each year of the house: what got done, and what it cost.
Recently deleted
A document deleted by mistake can be brought back for 30 days.
iPad and tablets
A layout made for the bigger screen, on iPad and on Android tablets.
Light and dark
Follows your phone, at any hour.
The vocabulary
Nine words for a whole house
Everything in HomeCubbie is one of nine things, and each is called the same thing everywhere — in the menus, in the forms, and here.
- PropertyThe house. The root of everything.
- PlaceA room or an area.
- ThingSomething owned, living in a Place.
- TaskSomething to do. Needs a schedule to ever surface.
- PolicyAnything with a term and an end date — insurance, a warranty, a registration.
- EventSomething that already happened — a repair, a replacement, a purchase.
- NoteA fact about the house. No date, no reminder.
- PersonSomeone dealt with — an insurer, a trade, a household member.
- AccountSomething billed on a cycle — electricity, water, internet, the mortgage.
Questions
What people ask first
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no sign-in and no email address. You open the app and add your first room. There is nothing of ours that knows you exist.
Can my partner and I both use it?
Yes. Your household runs the HomeCubbie server on a computer at home, and each phone joins it with a one-time invite. Everything is encrypted on the phone before it travels, so the server holds your house without being able to read it. iPhones and Android phones can share one house.
What happens when we're away from home?
Every phone keeps its own copy of the house, so it works on the road. Changes made while you're out are sent the next time the phone is on your home Wi-Fi. A document added on another phone comes down the first time you open it at home — or straight away on the home Wi-Fi, if you ask the phone to download everything.
What if I lose my phone?
If your household shares, the house is still on the other phones and the server — remove the lost phone from another one, and the key changes in the same step. If it's just one phone, restore the backup you saved off it. HomeCubbie's weekly backup is kept on the phone itself unless, on Android, you pick a folder for it, so save a copy somewhere else now and then.
Which devices does it run on?
iPhone and iPad with iOS 16.4 or later, and Android phones and tablets with Android 7.0 or later. A household that runs the server can also open the house in a laptop's browser, served by that same server.
Does anything I photograph get sent off to be read?
No. Bills, serial plates and documents are read on the phone, with the phone's own text recognition. In a shared house, the photo goes to your household's other phones, encrypted — and to nobody else.
More on the support page.
Coming to iPhone and Android
HomeCubbie isn't in the stores yet. If you have a question before it is, it goes straight to the person who built it.