The heating came on for the first time this week, and somebody said “wasn’t the boiler meant to be serviced?” Nobody knew. So you went looking for the best home maintenance app.

The roundups you found rank by feature count. Fifty preset tasks. Appliance manuals. Booking a pro. Every page has a different price for the same app, and one of them still recommends an app whose website now sells lottery tickets.

We checked each one on its own site today. The question that decides it for a household turned out to be short: are the jobs free to keep, and can the other adult see them?

What decides the best home maintenance app for a household

Read the feature grids side by side and most of the category agrees. Seasonal checklists. Reminders. A record of what was done. Somewhere to keep the paperwork. If you live alone, pick whichever one you like the look of.

If you do not, two things matter far more than the task library. Whether the free plan holds maintenance at all, and whether a second person can see the jobs without a second subscription. The diagram above is those two questions asked of every free tier, read off each company’s own pricing page or App Store listing on 12 October 2026.

Maintenance does not fail at knowing. It fails on the Tuesday the engineer can come and the person who booked him is at work.

You already know the gutters need doing. The home maintenance checklist by season has the whole list, and the reason it does not get done is that a season is not a date and a list has nobody’s name on it.

The same boiler, in Chirpy

Here is what this looks like in Chirpy. Open the Home tool and add a record: boiler service, category Maintenance, last done 3 October last year, what it cost, the engineer’s number in a detail line. Set “Renews / due” to the first week of October.

That date now sits on the household calendar, on the day, for everyone in the house. Your partner sees it on their phone without being told. When the engineer has been, open the record, put in the new date and the new cost, and next year’s reminder is already there.

And on a Sunday evening either of you can ask Chirpy “what’s due on the house before Christmas?” and it reads back every home record with a due date in the next three months. The assistant is on the free plan too, with a small monthly allowance.

Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, no card.

The best home maintenance apps, by household

Four apps and one warning. Every figure came off the company’s own site or App Store listing on 12 October 2026, never off another roundup, because those disagree with each other about the same app.

HomeZada, if you own the house and run it like a project

The free Essentials plan includes home inventory, home documents, a contact list, a news feed and ten AI chats, and family members can join free with their own logins. Home maintenance is not in it. Maintenance, remodel projects, home finances and reports are Premium, $99 a year or $15.95 a month. Deluxe is $189 a year and covers up to three properties.

Several roundups still quote $79 a year for Premium. The pricing page says $99. Budget for that, because the free plan is the inventory half and the maintenance half is the reason you came.

Oply, if you have just been handed an inspection report

Free on the App Store, with no in-app purchases listed. It gives maintenance recommendations and seasonal checklists, sends reminders, keeps a home history, and matches you with local pros. Its listing does not say whether a second adult can share the same home.

One thing Oply does that we do not: upload the forty-page inspection report from the purchase and it turns it into a prioritised list of what to fix first. For the years after that report, Chirpy holds the jobs next to the bills, the renewals and the calendar both of you already open, so the boiler service is on the same week as the school run rather than in an app you check when the house reminds you it exists.

Tody, if you actually meant cleaning

A lot of people searching for this want the hoovering on a rota, and Tody is built for exactly that. It is a cleaning schedule for iPhone, iPad and Android, free for one person with no ads. A live plan the whole household sees is Premium+, priced by size: $25 a year for two, $40 for six. Its site describes cleaning tasks only, so the gutters and the filter are not its job.

If cleaning is the real argument in your house, the best chore app for families goes through that side properly.

Chirpy, if the house is one of the things you run

The Home tool keeps the lease, the rent, the utilities, the internet and the maintenance as records with an amount, a date and a due date, and every due date lands on the shared calendar. The paperwork behind each one, the boiler manual and the warranty, is filed under Housing in Vault and shows up on the Home tool’s page. The one-off jobs (“buy a new filter, the 16 by 25 one”) go on a shared list that both of you tick from the shop.

You put in the jobs your house actually has, which for a flat with a combi boiler is about six, instead of scrolling past fifty written for a house with a basement and a deck.

Free against free, then paid against paid

Read the last row properly. Chirpy’s free plan is the whole Home tool for the whole household, plus the calendar, the lists, the meals and the money it lives next to. For $99 a year, HomeZada gives you a deeper maintenance module for one house. For $0, we give you the maintenance dates on the calendar your family already plans the week on.

Most home maintenance is a date, not a task

Strip the jobs down and almost all of them are one of two things. A recurring job with a last-done date, like the boiler, the gutters or the smoke alarms. Or a date somebody else chose, like the home insurance renewal or the boiler cover contract.

Both are dates. And a date only helps if it arrives somewhere the person who will be home is looking.

That is why the app with the biggest task library loses to the one that is open anyway. A reminder on your phone about a job your partner will be in for is a reminder to make a phone call. A date on the calendar you both use is a plan. It is also why the autumn jobs go first: three of them are bookings in a tradesperson’s diary, which is the whole point of how to get your house ready for winter.

The paperwork behind each job

The engineer leaves a service sheet. The new washing machine comes with a warranty card. Both decide money later, and both get filed in a drawer nobody can find in February.

In Chirpy the sheet goes in Vault under Housing, and Vault keeps the file in your own Google Drive. It then shows up on the Home tool’s page beside the job it belongs to. The habit of keeping that date and that receipt together is the whole of keep track of warranties and receipts, and if you are listing what you own as well, the best home inventory app is the same question asked of a different list.

Set it up in twenty minutes, this week

1. Walk the house once. Write down what you actually have: the boiler or furnace, the water heater, the alarms, the gutters if there are gutters.
2. Find the last-done date for each. The service sheet, the email from the engineer, the bank statement. A rough month beats nothing.
3. Add each one to the Home tool with a due date. Say who owns it in a detail line. Mine, yours, the man who comes.
4. Add the dates somebody else chose. Home insurance renewal, boiler cover, the end of a warranty.
5. Look at the calendar. Every one of those dates is now on it, for both of you.

• Renting? Skip the roof and add the landlord’s gas safety check and the lease end. Same tool, shorter list.
• Two homes? Put the address in a detail line on each record and both houses sit on one calendar.

Common questions