HomeBox

What is HomeBox?

HomeBox is an open source home inventory system built for cataloging the things you own. You add items with photos, prices, serial numbers, and warranty dates, organize them by location and label, and find any of them again with search — all from a single self-hosted web app.

What is HomeBox best for?

Homeowners, renters, and homelabbers who want a private record of their belongings — for insurance claims, warranty tracking, or just remembering which box the drill is in. It’s deliberately lightweight, so it suits people who want to run their own inventory on a spare server or Raspberry Pi rather than pay for a cloud app.

What can HomeBox do?

• Store items with photos, purchase price, current value, serial number, manufacturer, and warranty expiry
• Organize everything by nested locations, labels, and custom fields
• Generate printable QR-code labels so scanning an item opens its detail page
• Track documents and receipts attached to each item
• Import and export your whole inventory as CSV
• Support multiple users with separate inventory groups
• Automate anything through a full REST API
• Run as one small Go binary using under 50 MB of RAM, backed by SQLite or Postgres

Where does HomeBox fall short?

• There’s no native mobile app — HomeBox is a responsive web app, so QR scanning and photo capture happen through your phone’s browser rather than a dedicated iOS or Android app.
• Reporting is basic. You get item lists, totals, and CSV export, but not the rich valuation dashboards or scheduled reports that commercial inventory tools include.
• Development is community-paced. The original author handed the project to the sysadminsmedia organization, so new features land on a volunteer schedule rather than a funded product roadmap.

Is HomeBox free?

Yes — HomeBox is completely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. There is no paid tier, feature paywall, or cloud upsell from the project itself; you only pay for the server you run it on. Third-party hosts do offer managed HomeBox instances if you’d rather not self-host, but that’s their convenience fee, not the software’s.

What does HomeBox replace?

HomeBox is a self-hosted alternative to Sortly and the spreadsheets people use to track their stuff. It covers the same catalog-photos-locations-and-warranties workflow, but keeps your records on your own hardware with no per-seat subscription. It’s aimed at home use rather than the industrial asset management that tools like Snipe-IT target.

FAQ

Is HomeBox open source? Yes. HomeBox is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and the full source is public on GitHub. It’s genuine OSI-approved open source, not source-available.

Can I self-host HomeBox for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free — you deploy the Docker image and only pay for the server it runs on. There is no paid edition of HomeBox to buy.

Is HomeBox a good Sortly alternative? For home and small-scale use, yes. It handles photos, QR labels, warranties, and custom fields without Sortly’s monthly fee. If you need dedicated mobile apps or advanced business reporting, Sortly’s paid plans go further.

What do I need to run HomeBox? A machine with Docker. HomeBox ships as a single Go binary with an embedded web UI and defaults to SQLite, so it runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi; switch to Postgres for larger inventories.