I plan to continue to offer it for free, as the costs are so minimal and I want to use this service myself anyway.
Eventually, I may offer very minimal text-based links to Amazon and other stores for relevant lightbulbs, batteries, etc. (when you click on a "thing" in your house), and those affiliate fees would be more than enough to cover my hosting costs. I want to be clear, those links would be something like "Find a replacement lightbulb on Amazon". That's it.
There is no intention of making this project a unicorn.
Regardless of this app and speaking just as a spouse, I think it's important to feel like YOU accomplished something, regardless of whether anyone sees an official record saying that you did. Weekends fly by and I feel like I didn't tackle anything, but some sort of record (piece of paper, this website, etc.) can help remind me that, oh right, I did shovel the driveway five times and that's why I didn't get around to vacuuming the floors.
Yeah, that could absolutely be said for basically any website or app idea. And I totally get it. But there's sometimes a nice feeling to officially see your accomplishments logged somewhere. I focused on the ease-of-use -- click on the room, click one of the things in the room (that it already knows about from past interactions), and then click what you did to that thing (again, knowing what you've done to it in the past). It was a fun challenge.
In terms of data portability, one of the next features I'm working on is letting everyone easily download all of their data -- as JSON, XLSX, and CSV. Then you can leave whenever you choose.
One weekend, I had somehow successfully repaired my dishwasher (turns out it was just a bad fuse that cost $10 to replace), and three smoke detectors simultaneously needed batteries replaced. So at that point, I realized:
1) I wish I could record this very proud achievement of mine (regarding the dishwasher). And also make a note of where I got the fuse, how I fixed it, etc., in case it broke again.
2) I wish that I kept better track of when I replaced my smoke detector batteries, along with other routine household activities.
And so here we are! This idea expanded into -- what if I could log whenever I did tasks like this around the house/yard and also jot down details (model numbers, battery types, etc.) about appliances and other household objects so that I could quickly reference them whenever they're needed.
Give it a try and let me know your thoughts, positive or negative!
Many thanks to ChatGPT for helping me create this in about 30 minutes, having never worked with PDF manipulation in JavaScript before.