The best AI home inventory apps, and what AI can’t do

If you want the AI pitch delivered properly, Vorby is the one we’d look at first. Photo recognition identifies items, sorts them by room, and the receipt parsing reads your email inbox to pull purchase details in without you typing them. That last feature is genuinely clever and nobody else here does it as well.

Paid plans are unlimited items, which matters, because it means you aren’t doing arithmetic about your own house. At $60 a year that’s the cheapest unmetered AI on this page by some distance.

The gap: Vorby advertises a free tier and doesn’t say anywhere we could find what its limits are. We don’t like that and we’re not going to guess on their behalf. There’s also no Android app listed, so half the planet is on the web version.

HomeZada is the grown-up of this list. It’s been around far longer than the rest, and inventory is only one part of it: maintenance schedules, remodel projects, home finances, multiple properties. If you want software that treats your house as an asset, this is the real one.

Its AI is the clearest illustration of the point this whole page is making. The free Essentials plan gives you five AI photos. Five. Recognition AI proper sits on the $99/yr Premium plan, and even there you’re spending credits — 100 AI chats, 20 design photos, and $25 buys 300 more when you run out.

That isn’t HomeZada being stingy. It’s what AI recognition costs when someone has to pay the bill, and they’re being more transparent about it than most. Deluxe at $189/yr covers up to three properties, then $99 a year per property after that.

Credit where it’s due: Scanlily publishes its entire pricing ladder on one page, in a table, with the item counts written down. After the afternoon we spent trying to find out what some of these apps cost, that deserves saying out loud.

AI photo recognition describes and categorizes what you shoot, natural-language search works well, and there’s an optional QR label system — and a nice touch, items with a purchased Scanlily label don’t count toward your item limit. The free tier at 500 items is five times Sortly’s, which is not nothing.

But look at the shape of that ladder: free is 500 items and one user, then $9 a month, then $35 for 2,000 items and five users, then $75 for 5,000. Priced by record count, tiered by seats. That is Sortly’s model exactly, with AI bolted on top — the same model we spent a whole page arguing is wrong for households. A house isn’t doing anything with 2,000 records. It just owns them.

ShelfLily comes from the Scanlily team and is the free, simpler take on the same idea: photograph a thing, let the AI describe it, search your shelves in plain English. It leans toward collections — it’ll pull authors and genres off book spines — and it does barcode and QR scanning too.

It’s billed as free, with no tiers published. We’d treat that with mild caution rather than suspicion: it shares a company and a QR label system with Scanlily, which is very much not free, so it’s reasonable to wonder where this lands in two years. But right now it’s the only AI recognition on this page you can use without a credit counter or a card.

Bevel builds an insurance-ready inventory from video and photos of your rooms, checks current prices for what it finds, and exports a report you can hand an insurer. It came out of the 2025 Los Angeles fires, and its testimonials are from people who lost houses. The underinsurance problem it’s pointed at is real and badly served.

Two things to be straight about. There is no free tier — Standard is $60 a year (marked down from $100) for one property, Estate is $250 a year for unlimited properties with art and jewellery galleries. And it’s still behind “Get Early Access”, which is why we’ve got it here rather than higher up.

If you’ve seen Bevel described as completely free, that was true of an earlier incarnation and isn’t now. We checked their pricing page in July 2026. It’s worth checking again yourself, because this one is clearly still moving.

A page about AI recognition that doesn’t mention this isn’t being straight with you. Apple Photos and Google Photos already do object recognition, for free, on photos you’ve already taken. Search your own camera roll for “bicycle” and see what comes back. It’s better than people expect.

For a shortlist of valuables, that plus a folder is a legitimate answer, and it costs nothing and needs no account.

It falls down in exactly the same place every app on this page falls down, only harder. It can find you a picture of your passport. It has no idea where the passport is. And a camera roll has no structure, so at 400 items you’re scrolling, not searching.