Centriq, an app that kept manuals, receipts and warranties for a lot of homes, told its users it would shut down on January 31, 2026 (shutdown email, as one user posted it). The email said all versions of the platform would be retired. By March its web address was parked (Wayback Machine, March 8, 2026), and by May it was showing a betting site (Wayback Machine, May 11, 2026). If you kept your home’s records there, the place they lived is gone.
That’s the short version. The longer version is why I started Homaic.
Why I’m writing this
When we bought our home, I was handed binders that told its whole history, and I didn’t yet know how valuable that would be. I wasn’t raised to be handy. Every place I’ve lived, owned or rented, came with its own learning curve, and with no family nearby and no handyman on speed dial, I learned from YouTube and overpaid for help while trying to translate the jargon. Reading those binders, I realized I’d just become the single point of failure for everything about the house, with no good way to share it with my family.
I went looking for software, and Centriq was the tool people liked. I bought my house in December 2025. Centriq shut down in January 2026. I read Reddit threads from people scrambling to download their records or locked out entirely, and found no real alternative. So I started building.
Centriq’s story
James Sheppard and Shubber Ali, both former vice presidents of innovation at Salesforce, founded Centriq in January 2015 (HomeServe release).
The idea was good. You took a photo of an appliance’s label, and Centriq found the product. Then it pulled up the manual, how-to videos, parts and recall alerts. You could keep receipts, warranties and paint colors in the same place (Centriq’s App Store listing, archived). Anyone who has dug through a kitchen drawer for a dishwasher manual gets it right away.
It raised money from serious backers. Office Depot invested in a round of about $4.8 million in 2017 (SEC Form D, 2017, Florida Trend). HomeServe USA invested in 2018 and licensed the platform for its own branded version (HomeServe). Its SEC filings add up to about $11 million raised in total (SEC EDGAR). The National Association of Realtors picked it for its 2017 REach accelerator, run by its venture arm, Second Century Ventures (NAR).
Shubber Ali left in 2017. He is on the company’s 2017 SEC filing and not on the later ones (2017, 2018).
The company said it was in more than 400,000 homes (ProBuilder). That’s the company’s own number, and I couldn’t find an audit of it. Its Android app showed 50,000+ downloads (Google Play, archived).
How Centriq shut down
The signs came slowly. By late 2020, the free tier held five items (Centriq’s pricing page, archived). Over time the company leaned toward inspectors, builders, real estate agents and property managers, who could hand the app to homeowners (Centriq’s professionals page, archived).
The company behind it changed too. From July 2023, Centriq’s own privacy policy named it as “PT Intermediate Holdings IV, LLC and its affiliates and subsidiaries” (privacy policy, archived). I couldn’t find a public announcement of that change.
The last app update shipped in April 2025 (App Store, archived). Then users got an email. One posted it word for word: “Centriq will cease operations as of January 31, 2026. All versions of the platform will be retired.” (AlternativeTo)
That’s most of what’s on the public record. I couldn’t find a notice on Centriq’s own site, and no reason was given. Centriq never said publicly what happened to users’ data. Its own privacy policy allowed it to be handed to “a buyer or other successor” (privacy policy, archived). I don’t know how many people saved their things in time and how many didn’t. Nobody I can find has counted that, so I won’t guess.
The paper trail matters most to me. Centriq’s own export was a report you had to request, a list of your items with model and serial numbers (Centriq’s features page, archived). It wasn’t a copy of your files. A receipt photo is often the only proof of when you bought something. A warranty PDF is often the only copy. When the app that holds them closes, they don’t come back.
Why home management apps shut down
Centriq isn’t the first home product to go away. Home tech has a long list of them.
In 2016, Nest shut off the cloud service behind Revolv’s $299 smart home hub, and the hubs stopped working. Nest refunded buyers after it announced the shutdown (FTC closing letter). In 2020, Wink started charging a monthly fee, and owners who didn’t pay lost most of what their hub did (The Verge). In April 2022, Insteon turned off its servers without warning (Ars Technica). iHome ended its cloud service that same month (The Verge). A group of Insteon customers later bought the company and turned it back on (The Verge), which tells you how much people cared. Google’s Nest Secure alarm lost cloud support in April 2024 (The Verge).
Some home companies change instead of closing. Hello Alfred started in 2014 by sending people into apartments to help residents with errands and home tasks. It grew into software and operations for property managers (Propmodo, PR Newswire). That’s a fair business choice. But the version built for the person living there isn’t the version that survived.
Look at enough of these and a few patterns show up.
Who pays. If the money comes from partners, builders, brokers or insurers, the homeowner is how the business reaches its customer, and the homeowner isn’t the customer. Centriq’s money came partly from partners (HomeServe), and it later moved toward builders, agents and inspectors. That’s a legitimate business. It’s just a different thing from a record that works for you.
Lead and placement money. When an app gets paid for the referral, the referral is the product. Your record is the bait.
The data is the asset. If the company’s value is the data, the data goes wherever the company goes. From September 2024, Centriq’s own privacy policy said: “We may sell the Personal Information you upload or otherwise provide on Centriq mobile application with appliance manufacturers, home warranty providers, and other similar third parties” (privacy policy, archived).
One point of failure. Your records live on someone else’s servers, under someone else’s runway. When the servers go, so do the records.
Why now is different
I don’t think we’re smarter than the people who came before. I think a few real things changed.
The first is that AI can read papers now. The hardest part of a home record was always typing it in. Nobody wants to enter a model number at 10 p.m. Today you can take a photo of a receipt or add a warranty PDF, and the facts come out of it. That changes whether people keep a record at all.
The second is that keeping the originals is cheap. Storing the actual document, not just a line in a spreadsheet, isn’t the expensive part anymore.
That’s where Homaic comes in. It’s a house record, and I’m building it around a few promises I can point to in writing.
We take no money for placement, ranking or referral. Nobody pays us to show you a pro, a brand or a policy.
On AI, here is exactly what happens: Anthropic reads what you ask and the documents you add. OpenAI makes it searchable. Neither trains on it.
Every fact about your things and your home keeps where it came from: a paper, a photo, a list, or you.
Homaic is free for one house.
What your home’s data is worth
Your home’s record is its manual, its repair history and its proof: what got fixed, when, who did it, and what warranty covers it. You need it when something breaks, when you file a claim, and when you sell.
That value is exactly why other people want it. Insurers, lenders and lead buyers would all love to know what’s inside your walls.
So here’s what our privacy policy says, word for word: “Homaic never sells, rents, licenses or gives away any home’s record or any person’s data, identified or ‘deidentified’. No ads, no ad pixels, no audiences.” (homaic.io/privacy, §0)
And: “No insurer, lender, landlord, employer or broker receives household-level data from Homaic, and none may buy figures for pricing, underwriting or eligibility, even where the law would allow it.” (§2.4)
Who controls your home’s data when AI reads it
For me, control comes down to two things. You decide who sees your record, and the company holding it can’t decide for you, including when that company is gone.
The first line of our privacy policy is: “Homaic’s data never works against the person it came from.” (§0)
On AI training, the policy says: “No AI provider may train on your data, with or without consent, and Homaic never sells or licenses a model trained on Homaic records.” (§0)
And because of Centriq, this is the section I care about most. Word for word: “If Homaic closes, every owner gets 90 days’ notice and an export in an open format, and then the data is deleted. The records are never sold.” (§4.15)
I wrote that knowing every company thinks it will be the one that lasts. Centriq’s team surely thought so too. A promise about what happens at the end is only worth something if you make it while things are going well.
To be straight about where we are: Homaic isn’t launched. I’m not going to tell you about features we haven’t shipped yet.
The future
A few things I think are coming for homeowners, whether or not Homaic is the one that builds them.
Your own AI will be able to read your home’s record and answer real questions. When was the water heater replaced? Is the dishwasher still under warranty? The answer will come from your papers and not from a guess.
Records across many homes could answer questions nobody can answer today, such as how long water heaters really last. Our policy only allows that if you say yes, and only in groups of at least 11 homes (§2.2, §2.3).
And the record should belong to the home’s owner, not to whichever app they happened to download in 2016.
Managing a home is a job. The records for that job shouldn’t depend on someone else’s runway.
If you used Centriq, I’m curious what you lost and what you managed to save. What’s the one home paper you’d panic to lose?
Look up your home at homaic.io.