Executive Summary

Many homeowners, small landlords, and prosumer tech users still track warranties, invoices, and maintenance schedules in ad-hoc spreadsheets or scattered PDFs, which is time-consuming, error-prone, and makes it hard to see lifetime costs or prepare for resale. With 80M US owner households and roughly $80 ARPU implied for maintenance/records software, this is a widespread operational pain that currently lacks a lightweight, privacy-respecting alternative. Build a terminal-first home maintenance tracker: a keyboard-driven CLI that ingests receipts via OCR and LLM parsing into a small local database (SQLite), auto-tags repairs, surfaces recurring maintenance, sends calendar reminders, and exports clean CSVs to replace users’ spreadsheets. Make it local-first and optional cloud-sync, with integrations for git-backed versioning and easy import from existing files so the migration path is frictionless. The market looks attractive now because improved OCR/LLM accuracy reduces manual entry costs and digital adoption of home services is rising, supporting a $6.4B addressable market; prosumer developer communities (HN, Reddit, Bluesky) are a strong, low-cost early-adopter channel for privacy-focused tools. A lightweight $5–$15/month or one-time paid model aimed at power users could capture meaningful revenue with low CAC if product-market fit is found. You can differentiate by shipping a privacy-first, offline-capable, keyboard-centric workflow that feels like a serious replacement for spreadsheets and by open-sourcing core tooling to accelerate trust and contributions. The main challenges are moving beyond the prosumer niche to mainstream homeowners (UX and distribution), competing with established web/mobile incumbents, and proving OCR/LLM reliability across messy real-world invoices—these are surmountable but require focused UX work and strong early community traction.

Market Opportunity

Terminal-first home maintenance tracker replacing spreadsheets targets a $6.4B = 80M US owner households × $80 ARPU per year for home maintenance/records software total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 8% YoY — estimated digital home services and home management tool adoption (Statista 2024 estimates for home services/digital adoption).

Key trends driving demand: Trend — Digital adoption of home services and record-keeping is increasing, creating demand for lightweight management tools that replace spreadsheets.; Trend — Improved OCR and LLM parsing make automated ingestion of receipts and invoices accurate enough to significantly reduce manual entry.; Trend — Prosumer developer communities (HN, Bluesky, Reddit) are a reliable early-adopter channel for privacy-focused, terminal-first tools.; Trend — Rising long-term homeownership costs increase interest in tools that reduce maintenance spend through better tracking and preventative reminders..

Key competitors include HomeZada, Centriq, Thumbtack, Sortly.

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Terminal-first home maintenance tracker replacing spreadsheets

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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