Free for the Basics. Forever. $7.99 Unlocks the Rest.

A year ago Aki and Tom had the same argument three times in one week. Once about the kettle, once about the spare keys, once about a charging brick that had quietly migrated into a shoebox under the bed. After the third one, Aki installed AllKeep.

This post is what happened across the next twelve months, what they paid, when, and why — and why the pricing is the shape it is.

Month 0 — they started free

The first weekend was a declutter. They photographed the kitchen shelves, the hall cupboard, the two "we'll sort that later" boxes under the bed. They didn't pay anything, didn't sign up for a trial — installed it, shared the kitchen workspace between their two phones, started snapping.

Aki found the kettle in 20 seconds. (It was in the dishwasher. The app didn't tell her that — she searched "kettle", saw the last photo was tagged "kitchen counter", didn't see it on the counter, and the only other place that made sense was the dishwasher. Inventory plus eyes.) That's the whole free tier doing its job.

Months 1–4 — mostly forgetting the app exists

This is the bit nobody writes blog posts about. They didn't open AllKeep for ten days. Then they did, to add a guitar pedal Tom bought. Then they didn't open it for two weeks. Then a friend asked to borrow the camping stove and Aki opened it to check which box it lived in.

Roughly: five to fifteen items added a month, "where is X" asked once every couple of weeks, otherwise the app was off-stage. That's correct. An inventory you have to think about is an inventory you abandon.

Month 5 — the move-in, and the first time free pinched

They moved flats in April. Forty-two new boxes, a few hundred items photographed in a single weekend. Around day two of the move, the photo-naming stopped suggesting names.

What happened: the free tier includes a monthly bucket of photo-recognition credits — enough to taste the flow and enough for a normal household pace. Aki and Tom hit the ceiling around the 200th photo of the weekend.

The app didn't break. They could still create items, boxes, share, search. The camera still took photos. It just stopped auto-suggesting "ceramic mug, kitchen, blue" and started leaving the name field blank for them to type.

They typed names for the rest of the weekend. Annoying, not crippling.

Month 6 — they subscribed

The next month's free credits would have refilled in eleven days. They didn't want to wait. $7.99/month felt fair for the move; they tapped subscribe. (Or $79.99/year if they'd been in a yearly mood — they weren't.) The auto-naming came back, the Ask feature came back, and the rest of the move went the way the first weekend had: photograph, confirm, done.

Months 6–12 — they forgot they were paying

This is the part I want to emphasise because it's the boring truth about subscriptions that work. They didn't open the subscription screen again. They didn't get an upgrade nag. The camera flow just kept working.

They asked the app "where is X" about once a week on average — sometimes a screwdriver, once a passport, once a specific charging cable. They found things.

In December, Tom looked at the bank statement, saw the $7.99 line, thought about it for ten seconds, and didn't cancel.

A second couple, still on free

Across town, my parents have been running AllKeep for fourteen months on the free tier. They photograph maybe one new thing a fortnight — a new lamp, a replacement vacuum, the box of cables my dad keeps reorganising. Their monthly recognition credits are never even close to spent.

They have no reason to pay us, and we have no plans to give them one. A retired couple with a slow-burn inventory is exactly who the free tier is for. The policy isn't a loss-leader trick where we quietly throttle them next year — it's the policy. If they ever need the Ask feature heavily, they'll subscribe. Until then, the app is theirs for free, indefinitely.

What's actually gated

Plain list, no asterisks:

Free, permanently: items, boxes, locations, multiple workspaces, sharing with family, full-text search, manual photos, manual names and tags. Use the app forever without paying us a yen.

Free also includes a monthly bucket of photo-recognition credits — enough to feel how the camera-first flow works without having to commit.

$7.99/month or $79.99/year: unlimited photo recognition (the flow where you snap an item and the app reads the photo, suggests a name, suggests tags), and the Ask feature (where you type "where are the Christmas lights?" and get a real answer pointing at a real box).

That's the whole split. There's no fifth tier, no enterprise upsell, no "premium plus" we're holding back.

The competitive shadow

I'll be diplomatic about this and brief.

Some apps in this category started at five dollars a month and were later migrated onto plans starting in the hundreds. Real users woke up one morning to a quote that was about eighty times what they'd signed up for. The reviews from that wave are still on the Play Store; they're worth reading before you trust your household to any inventory app.

One of the larger players in adjacent territory is winding down its consumer product in 2026 and pivoting to business customers. Households that catalogued their homes on it are looking for somewhere to land.

AllKeep's pricing is $7.99/month or $79.99/year. The free tier is permanent. I'm writing it down here so it's on the record. That's the whole pitch on this slide.

Why the trust thing matters

The worst possible time to discover that your inventory app has changed its pricing is the day after a flood, or the morning of a move, or the afternoon you're trying to file a claim. The whole reason to keep an inventory is for the bad day, and the whole reason it lives in an app instead of a notebook is that the app is supposed to be there when you reach for it.

So the cost of switching an inventory app is high — you've photographed everything, named everything, taught it where your stuff lives. An app that exploits that lock-in by raising prices once you're invested is doing a specific kind of harm.

We picked $7.99/$79.99 because it's a price we can hold. It pays the recognition bill, pays for the servers, pays a small team. It's not a land-grab price waiting to be revised once we've got you. If we ever have to change it, current subscribers stay on the price they signed up at. That's the deal.

What this means in practice

If you're a tidy household that photographs the occasional new thing — stay free. We mean it.

If you're moving, renovating, doing an insurance pass, or otherwise photographing in volume — the subscription is $7.99 and you can cancel the month after the move. We won't be offended.

If you've been burned by another inventory app's pricing — welcome. The free tier is enough to start. For the broader story of how we shipped the app and landed on this pricing, see the launch post.

To try it on a real shelf in your real flat: Install Inventory by AllKeep on Google Play. Free, no card required, no trial countdown. Open it, photograph a shelf, see whether it earns the $7.99 for you. Or doesn't. Both outcomes are fine by us.