Family Invites. Without Ghosting.

Solo home-inventory accounts have a quiet death curve.

You start strong. You photograph the kitchen, label some boxes, feel like an organized adult. Then your partner reorganizes the storage closet without telling you. The inventory drifts out of sync. Within a month it's wrong about half your boxes. You stop opening the app.

Two-person households quietly defeat single-user inventory tools. This post is about the version we built so that doesn't happen — and the small thing about invites that nobody else seems to do.

The "send link, then what" problem

Every other inventory app I tried has the same sharing flow. You generate a link. You text it to your partner. Then nothing.

Did they open it? Did they install the app? Did they accept? Did they accidentally swipe the notification away while making dinner and forget about it? You don't know. The link exists in iMessage limbo and the inventory is still, functionally, yours alone. A month later you're asking your partner over breakfast whether they ever actually joined the thing, and they say "the what?"

So the first thing we did differently is this: invites in AllKeep have a status. Pending, accepted, declined. You can see it on your Shares tab. The kitchen invite to your partner says pending — sent 3 days ago. The garage invite to your sibling says accepted yesterday. The storage invite to your in-laws says declined (which is information, even when it's the answer you didn't want).

You don't have to ask anyone whether they joined the thing. You look at your phone. The household actually knows who's in.

The partner case

Here's how this plays out in our flat.

• I log the kitchen, garage, and storage closet.
• My partner logs the bedroom, bathroom, and her closet.
• We share the kitchen with each other (we both cook) and the storage closet (we both lose things in there).
• We don't share each other's clothes closets. Why would we.

Sharing is per box, not per account. You can share the kitchen without sharing the bedroom. You can share one moving box with parents who are helping and keep the rest of the workspace private. The granularity matches the way actual households think.

The result: one inventory, two contributors, zero duplication. When she puts the colander in a new spot and photographs it, I see the update on my phone. The "where is X" question essentially disappears.

This was a feature we built for ourselves first. Other users quickly told us it was the entire reason they'd started using the app.

The permission model

There are three levels:

Viewer

Can see boxes, items, photos, search. Cannot edit.

Use case: you want a family member to be able to find the spare car keys when they need them, but you don't want them reorganizing the inventory.

Editor

Can add, edit, and delete items in a shared box. Cannot delete the box itself, cannot change permissions.

Use case: your partner. Roommates. The most common share level in two-person households.

Manager

Editor permissions + can invite other people to the same box, change the box itself, transfer ownership.

Use case: a co-owner. Adult kids managing a parent's storage unit. Co-founders sharing a workshop inventory.

You can also revoke any share at any time, instantly. The other user loses access on next sync — no waiting period, no email chain.

Use cases we've seen

Couple splitting kitchen + garage

The default we expected. Two phones, one inventory. Both can add items, both see updates.

Parents and adult kids tracking storage

Less obvious but very common. An adult child has stuff in their parents' garage. The parents need to find it sometimes ("which box has your old college textbooks"). Adult child shares the relevant boxes as viewer — parents can find things, can't accidentally delete them.

Roommates sharing common areas

Three roommates, shared kitchen and living room. Each has their own bedroom workspace (private). The shared spaces are a multi-editor box — anyone can update what's in the kitchen pantry.

Splitting an estate

Sad but real. Family members tracking what's in a parent's home after a passing. Sharing the inventory turns a stressful logistics problem into a coordinatable one. We've had multiple users tell us this was where the app earned its keep for them.

What's coming

The honest "not done yet" list:

• Read-only public links — for things like estate sales, garage sales, "here's what I'm selling" listings. Currently shares require an AllKeep account on both sides.
• Archive mode — a way to "freeze" a shared box (e.g. when someone moves out) without deleting it.
• Notification controls — right now you get every change notification on a shared box. We're adding per-share filters.

Privacy and data

A few things worth saying clearly:

• We don't sell your data. Shared boxes are not treated any differently from private ones on our end.
• Photos in a shared box are visible to everyone in the share. Obvious but worth saying — don't share a box and expect photos to be private from the people you shared with.
• Revoking a share removes access on the other person's next sync. Cached data on their device is wiped on next open.

Full policy: allkeep.org/en/privacy.

A neighbor feature: workspaces across places

Sharing is how a household coordinates across people. The sibling feature is how the same person coordinates across places — your flat, your parents', the Airbnb you co-host. One account, several workspaces, separately shared. If the partner case in this post is your situation, the workspaces post about Home / Parents' / Airbnb is the natural next read.

Send one invite

If you already have an account, sharing is in the box context menu — three dots → Share → invite by email. Then, importantly, check your Shares tab tomorrow and see whether it says accepted or pending. That's the part that changes the game.

If you don't have an account yet — install the Android app, set up one workspace, share one box. Once the second person accepts, the "where did you put X" question stops being a question.

Install Inventory by AllKeep on Google Play →