Consider on your roadmap a white label option for companies that might want to offer this service to customers (home insurers, primarily, although I'm sure there are other use cases). Longer sales cycle, but more recurring revenue, more sticky, less price sensitive. Charge enough to make it worth your time, but not so much that a non-tech/biz person would try to gather resources together to build it in house.
American Family Insurance used to offer an app for this called DreamVault (https://appadvice.com/app/dreamvault/536354802). They discontinued it in 2016 shortly after I put my whole house inventory into it of course. It had enough features to make it useful but wasn't very impressive overall. There may be some perverse incentives in NOT having this service for home insurers. If you don't have a good home inventory, they can pay a reduce reimbursement amount.
This is why I would never trust a hosted web app to do something like this. I fully expect my house to last much longer than any such company. I’d want an app I run on my computer with data that I can export to something time lasting like CSV/PDF/etc.
Whitelabel is great, especially for apartment complexes and such, I can see this item being popular if a landlord wants to enforce renters insurance and such and even for airbnb/short term rental hosts that have 5+ properties, you want a place to easily look up receipts, condition, depreciation, and be able to share how old something is when a guest breaks something / to debate if it's worth to charge the guest. If a TV breaks, but it cost $300, and it broke 4 years, it's most likely yeah lifetime to replace, if it breaks in less than a year, and most likely not from user being rough, easy to get the receipt do a warranty repair, etc.
Meanwhile, I also am surprised how easy of an app can be so wanted, I solved this for myself, just to see how many things I buy/what to sell them for/depreciation for tax time (since it's for businesses.) in one spreadsheet.
I'm definitely considering this, especially to enhance the in-app search for finding your items quickly. I like that you mentioned book ISBNs specifically as that's not something I had considered yet. Thank you for your feedback, I'll keep it in mind going forward!
FYI, most barcode readers just “type” the keys into the keyboard buffer or HID. You could literally just have a text input box (that honors enter key) to make it barcode enabled. Of course x-reference this info with something like the “what” database and you’d have great input.
I recall the "zbar" library being (relatively) easy to integrate and working damn well out of the box, on both iOS and Android, back in 2011 or 2012. I'd expect it's gotten even easier, if anything. It's been a while but IIRC you just find a way to hand it bitmaps from your camera, and it does the rest, spotting and decoding QR and bar codes.
