Questions and answers

What is HomeRunner?

HomeRunner is a home-management app for iPhone and Android. It keeps every appliance and system in your home as an item with its photo, specs, manual, maintenance schedule, warranty, and service history, shared with everyone who lives there. It reads rating plates with the camera, finds manuals from the model number, scans receipts into the history, and prints the whole home as one PDF binder.

What does HomeRunner cost?

Every home starts with a free month of everything. After that it is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, billed through the App Store or Google Play. One subscription covers everyone who shares the home. Cancel any time in the phone's subscription settings. The emergency shutoffs page stays open whatever happens to the subscription.

Which phones does HomeRunner run on?

iPhone, through the App Store, and Android, through Google Play. People in the same home can mix the two.

How does HomeRunner find appliance manuals?

Give it a make and model, read from the rating plate by the camera or typed in, and it searches the web and the manufacturer's site for that model, saves the user's manual to the item, and makes it searchable by page. If it picked the wrong one, say so and choose another of the ones it found. You can also add any PDF you already have.

More on the manuals page.

Can more than one person use HomeRunner for the same house?

Yes. Each person has their own account and joins the same home with a short invite code. Everyone sees the same items, manuals, tasks, and history, and a task finished on one phone is finished on the others. One subscription covers the whole home.

More on the sharing page.

Does HomeRunner work without an internet connection?

Yes. Items, saved manuals, tasks, and the emergency shutoffs page are kept on the phone and open with no signal. Changes sync to the household when the connection returns. Reading a plate, identifying a photo, finding a manual, and scanning a receipt need a connection because they run on our servers.

What does the AI in HomeRunner do?

It reads the make, model, and serial number from a photo of a rating plate, identifies equipment from a photo, finds the manual for a model, reads receipts and work orders into history entries, and pulls the maintenance schedule out of a manual. It can be wrong: check a model or serial number against the plate before relying on it, and read the manual itself for anything involving gas, electricity, water, or structure. HomeRunner is not a substitute for a qualified tradesperson.

What happens to my data?

What you add is kept on your phone and copied to our servers so it can be shared with your household and restored on a new phone. Photos and documents are private to the members of the home. Photos you ask the app to read, the make and model when it searches for a manual, and a manual's pages when its schedule is pulled are sent to our server and to Anthropic. We do not sell or share your information, show advertising, or track you across other apps. You can delete your account from inside the app.

The privacy page has the full account.

Can HomeRunner make a home inventory for insurance or for selling the house?

Yes. Every item holds its photo, make, model, serial number, purchase date, price, warranty, documents, and service history. The binder puts the whole home in one PDF: the shutoffs, the contacts, and every item with everything on it, ready for an insurance claim, a buyer, or a house sitter.

More on the inventory page.

What are the QR labels for?

Every item has a QR label to print and stick on the thing itself. Any phone in the home that scans it opens that item: the manual, the last service, the next task. A phone outside the home sees only that the label belongs to something in a HomeRunner home, and nothing about the house.