Encircle Is Leaving Consumers. Here's What to Do This Week.

Sara found out on a Sunday. Not from the app — from a Reddit thread someone had pinned to the top of r/homeowners. Encircle was winding down the consumer product and turning the whole company toward restoration contractors. She read the linked post twice, then opened her email and yes, there it was, sitting under three Costco coupons and a school newsletter.

She closed the laptop. Stared at the ceiling for a minute.

Three years of room-by-room photos lived in that app. The kitchen, the garage, the boxes in the loft she'd labelled twice because she kept forgetting which one had the Christmas lights. The serial numbers on the back of the TV. The receipt for the camera she'd bought before her son was born. She'd done all of it specifically so that if anything ever happened — fire, flood, break-in — she wouldn't be the person standing in front of an adjuster trying to remember what a six-year-old laptop was called.

Now the app it all lived in was going away.

This post is for Sara, and the not-small number of households in her exact position right now. Not a hit piece. Encircle is making a business decision and the new direction is a real one — restoration contractors have been their power users for years and serving them well is a fair thing to do. The consequence for households is just that the household version isn't part of the plan anymore.

So: what to do, in three moves, this week.

Move 1 — get your stuff out, even if you haven't picked a new app

Do this first. Before reading reviews, before downloading anything, before deciding what you think about any of this.

Export everything from Encircle while the export still works. Photos, room lists, receipts, the notes you wrote next to the washing machine three years ago. Dump it all into a folder somewhere safe — a Drive folder, a Dropbox, an external drive, doesn't matter, just somewhere that isn't only inside the app.

Two reasons this comes first. The export window is the thing with a deadline; the app-choosing decision isn't. And once your data is sitting in a folder you own, the rest of this becomes a much calmer process. You're choosing a new home for your inventory from a position of "I already have my stuff", not "I'm racing the clock".

If you do nothing else this weekend, do that.

Move 2 — decide what shape the new home should take

Here's the honest bit. Encircle was built around insurance claims. The whole interaction model assumes that one day you'll be sitting across from an adjuster and you'll want to hand over a clean, room-by-room dossier. That use case is real and Encircle did it well.

If you weren't filing a claim, though — and most years, you weren't — the daily UX was a lot. You weren't documenting for an adjuster on a Tuesday morning. You were trying to remember which box in the garage had the camping stove because your brother was driving over to borrow it.

A household inventory has a different shape than a contractor's intake form. The everyday job is finding things faster on a Tuesday. The insurance scenario is the rare-but-important edge case the inventory also has to survive. Most home apps get the ratio backwards, and Encircle's pivot is partly an admission that the consumer side of the ratio was never really its sport.

So before you pick a replacement, ask yourself what you actually used Encircle for. If the answer was "I built the dossier and then never opened it", you have permission to pick something lighter that you'd open every couple of weeks.

Move 3 — move the high-value items first, not all of them

This is the part where people get stuck and abandon the whole migration.

A new app feels like a fresh spreadsheet, which feels like a mandate to recreate the entire three years of work in one evening. You won't. Nobody does. The garage alone will defeat you, and then the half-rebuilt inventory will sit there making you feel guilty for six months.

Don't do that. Do this instead.

Move the high-value items first. Anything you'd be sad to lose. Anything with a serial number. Anything you've ever insured separately. The camera, the laptop, the bike, the watch, the TV, the espresso machine your mother-in-law gave you. That's a one-evening job, maybe two, and after it you already have an inventory that's worth having.

The rest can come back over a few weekends. Or it can come back when it comes back — the cables drawer is not load-bearing. You're not rebuilding a museum, you're rebuilding the bit that matters first and then living with the rest.

Why AllKeep fits the household shape

Short section. Not a comparison table. Just the two or three things that actually matter if your previous app was Encircle.

Built for living with stuff, not for filing one claim. The daily use is finding the kettle on a Tuesday. The insurance scenario is the bad-day backup. Both have to work, but the Tuesday one is what determines whether you ever open the app again.

Multiple photos per item. Encircle's one-photo-plus-receipt model is hard on anything with a serial sticker on the back, a dent on the side, and a model number on the bottom. With more than one photo per item, the sticker, the receipt, the dent and the front-of-box shot all live on the same card and you stop having to choose.

Sharing with the people you actually live with. Households are two or three contributors, not one heroic person who does all the documenting. AllKeep tracks who accepted the invite, who's still thinking about it, who declined — so you know whether your partner is actually going to add the garage or whether you're doing it yourself this weekend.

That's it. Three things. The rest of the app you'll find on your own.

The trust thing, briefly

This is the second time in 18 months that a major home-inventory tool has changed its deal with consumers. The earlier one was a different app that quietly migrated $5-a-month users onto plans starting in the hundreds. Different mechanism, same lesson: the cost of switching an inventory app is high, and the cost of switching one unexpectedly is higher.

So the only honest thing to do is write the policy down where you can see it. AllKeep's free tier is permanent. The subscription is $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year and we picked those numbers because they're numbers we can hold. If you want the longer version of that argument it's in the pricing post. I'm not going to relitigate it here. The shape of the deal is the shape of the deal.

What Encircle did well, for the record

The room-by-room template was good. The claims workflow was genuinely tuned for the moment a household actually needs an inventory the most, and people who used it in that moment got real value from it. The pivot to restoration contractors is a sensible business move and the product they'll build for that audience is probably going to be excellent.

None of that disappears just because the consumer side is ending. If you used Encircle for three years and it sat there quietly doing its job, that's three years of useful work, not wasted effort. The photos you took are still good photos. The serial numbers are still good serial numbers. They just need a new home.

What Sara did

She exported on Sunday night. Drive folder, two copies, one on the laptop, one on a USB stick in the drawer with the passports.

The next weekend she sat down with a coffee and the high-value list: TV, two laptops, the espresso machine, her husband's bike, the camera bag, the watch her dad left her. About forty items. She re-photographed them in an evening — front, serial, receipt where she still had it. She shared the workspace with her husband, who accepted on the train into work on Monday.

The garage is still mostly in the Drive folder. It'll come back over the autumn. That's fine. The bit that mattered moved in one evening, and the bit that didn't matter is waiting patiently in a folder she owns.

If you're in Sara's position this week, that's the whole playbook. Export first, decide second, move the important things third, and let the rest come back when it comes back.

To start the third step on a real shelf in your real home: Install Inventory by AllKeep on Google Play. Free, no card, no countdown. Photograph the camera bag, see whether the flow earns its place. The rest of the migration will keep.