HomewardAn Ardenholt programARDENHOLT · EST. 2026
No. 16 The Ardenholt RegisterIn the press for 2026Home & Family Est. MMXXVI

Your house is billing you quietly.

Homeward turns “I should probably do something about the gutters” into a dated list built from your home's age, systems and region. Four seasons of tasks, each with the reason it matters and what it costs to skip.

Nobody defers maintenance out of laziness. They defer it because a twelve-dollar filter and a four-thousand-dollar compressor feel like unrelated events, separated by a year and a service call. Homeward puts the two back in the same sentence, on the month the first one is due.

Join the register Read the program
$29.99Paid once, for as long as you own the house
13Things it asks whether your home has
5Climates it builds the schedule against
0Ads, and contractor referral kickbacks
§ I

§ I — The program

The filter and the compressor
are the same event.

What Homeward schedules, what it refuses to put on the list, and the promise attached to a single payment of $29.99.

Every task carries what skipping it costs

A maintenance list is a list of chores, and chores lose to everything. What changes the arithmetic is the second column: the choked filter that ices the coil and takes the blower with it, the gutter that spends three winters putting a roof's worth of water against the foundation, the tank whose solids reach a drainfield that costs five figures to replace.

So every task on the schedule carries the reason it matters and the typical bill on the other side of it, and the year's list adds those up into one number. That number is the product. It is what turns "I should get to that" into a Saturday morning, and it is the only thing in this category that has ever reliably done so.

The second column

It only ever lists what you actually own

A schedule that tells a condo owner to pump a septic tank is noise, and noise is why these apps get deleted in week two. Homeward asks what the home has — thirteen things, from the water heater and the gutters down to whether there are trees over the roof and pets that shed — and then never mentions the rest.

Climate does the same work. Freeze prep is the whole autumn in Minnesota and irrelevant in Miami; a coastal house rinses salt off its hardware and an inland one never thinks about it. Pick a condo and the roof, the gutters and the deck belong to somebody else: the list comes back short, and the app says so rather than padding it to look worth the money.

Your house

Ranges, not quotes, and some tasks priced at nothing

The costs are typical US repair and replacement ranges, gathered to give a number its shape. They are not quotes and the app never pretends otherwise — your contractor sets your price, and a schedule cannot see your actual roof. It tells you when to look.

Three of the tasks carry no figure at all. Testing the smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms, having the gas appliances checked, testing well water: these are life-safety jobs, and putting a dollar range beside them would be a lie dressed as motivation. Homeward marks them as safety and leaves the money column empty.

The honest column

Built to be outlived by its own records

This category has already taught its customers a lesson: a funded, well-known home-inventory app shut down and took its users' records with it. The people most likely to want a maintenance app are the people who have already been burned by one, and no amount of reassurance answers that — only architecture does.

Your home's details stay on the device, so there is no cloud copy to lose or to be asked for. What you record — what was serviced, when, and by whom — exports to a file you keep, which is also the file that tells you whether the water heater is four years old or eleven, and the one you hand the next owner. Homeward is bought outright precisely so that nothing about it depends on us still being here.

The record

The oath attached to the price

One payment of $29.99 — for as long as you own the house. Not a trial that becomes a subscription, not a tier holding the useful half back, and nothing that stops working in the month you stop paying, because you will not be paying. The releases that follow are yours too.

Purchases go through Apple, and Apple handles refunds. And the record stays on your device either way, because it was never anywhere else.

No ads, no contractor referral kickbacks. Nobody pays us when you hire a roofer, a plumber or a septic service, which is the entire reason nothing in the schedule will ever be shaped to send you to one. A maintenance app funded by the trades it recommends is not a maintenance app.

The house's word

The measure of a maintenance schedule is not how complete it looks in the store listing. It is whether, in the second November, it is still telling you the truth about your own house — a short list where the list is short, a real bill beside the job you were about to skip, and a record that will still be readable long after anyone has stopped thinking about the app that wrote it.

Standing prohibitions

Five things Homeward will not do, held as terms of the program rather than as a roadmap that can quietly change once the money has been taken.

  • No contractor referral kickbacks — nobody pays us when you hire someone, so nothing on the list is bent toward hiring
  • No subscription, and nothing that expires if you stop paying, because there is nothing to stop paying
  • No invented figures — typical ranges, never quotes, and no dollar range beside a life-safety task
  • No padded list; a condo owner gets a short one and is told why, rather than sold chores that belong to the association
  • No cloud copy of your house, and no account standing in front of the schedule
§ II

§ II — The purchase

Paid once, for as long
as you own the house.

The whole schedule, bought outright, on the day you buy it.

One payment

$29.99

Pay once and the schedule is yours — the seasons, the reminders, the record of what you did and when, and every release that follows, for as long as the house is yours. There is nothing to renew, nothing to cancel, and nothing that quietly becomes a monthly bill for a calendar.

Join the register

The terms

  • One payment of $29.99 — for as long as you own the house
  • Your home's details stay on the device
  • No ads, no contractor referral kickbacks
  • Free to download, on every platform it ships to.
  • Seven full days of the complete program.
  • A free core that stays useful forever, unpaid.
  • Thirty days, money back, no reasons needed.
§ III

§ III — Questions

Asked, answered,
printed.

The five questions people send in the first week of owning a house, answered at the length they deserve rather than at the length that converts.

I just got the keys. Where does this actually start?

With three things that fail expensively and quietly, and none of them are the ones people worry about. Change the HVAC filter. Find your main water shutoff before the night you need it. Put the furnace and the gutters on a seasonal cadence, and make the autumn gutter clean the one you never skip. After that the honest answer is that the right list depends on your house, which is the whole reason generic new-homeowner checklists fail: they cannot know whether you have a septic tank, a sump pump, or a roof that belongs to somebody else. Homeward asks first and lists second.

What happens to my records if you shut down?

Nothing happens to them, and that is a property of the architecture rather than a promise about our intentions. Your home's details stay on the device — there is no account, no cloud sync, and no server holding a copy — so there is nothing for us to lose, sell in an acquisition, or switch off. Your record of what was serviced and when exports to a file you keep. We know why you are asking: a funded, well-known home-inventory app in this category shut down and took its users' records with it, and reassurance is not an answer to that. Being bought outright and working offline is.

Why pay $29.99 when free seasonal checklists are everywhere?

Because a free checklist is a list for a house nobody lives in, and because free tools in this category are paid for somehow — usually by the trades they send you to. The paid version knows what your home actually has, drops everything it does not, prices what skipping each job tends to cost, and reminds you in the season it is due rather than the week you happen to open an app. Then it stops asking you for anything, forever: one payment of $29.99, for as long as you own the house. The seasonal schedule on this website stays free and needs no account, so you can see the shape of the thing before any of that.

Are those repair costs real, or are they there to scare me?

They are typical US repair and replacement ranges, and they are ranges precisely because the honest figure is a range. A skipped filter usually shows up as a blower motor at two to six hundred dollars; gutters left packed for years show up as a foundation, which is why that range runs from fifteen hundred into five figures and why it is so wide. What they are not is a quote for your house — Homeward is a schedule, not an inspection, and it cannot see your actual roofline. The three life-safety tasks carry no figure at all, because pricing an alarm test would be the dishonest version of the same idea.

I live in a condo. Is any of this for me?

Some of it, and the app will tell you plainly how little. Pick a condo and the roof, the gutters, the deck and everything else the association owns come straight off the list; what is left is the water heater, the alarms, the dryer vent, the appliances and the things behind your own door. That is a short list, and a short list is the correct output — we are not going to pad it so the purchase feels justified. If the honest version of your schedule looks too thin to pay for, the free schedule on this site will show you that before you buy anything.

The register

Be written in for the day Homeward opens.

One address, kept on our ledger and used once: the day it ships. No newsletter follows it, and it is never attached to your house, your address, or anything you entered into the schedule.