"What happens if this app is gone in a year?" is a fair question to ask before you spend a weekend photographing everything you own into it. It's also not hypothetical — it's already happened to people who trusted the wrong app with their inventory, more than once.
It's already happened — more than once
Encircle's consumer product went dark. Encircle built a genuinely good home-inventory tool, then pivoted the company toward restoration contractors and insurance adjusters. Consumer users lost data access on December 17, 2025. The app still exists — just not for the people who used it to catalog their own homes. If that was your app, the Encircle alternative page covers the switch in detail.
Centriq shut down in January 2025. The app was pulled from both app stores, and the "centriq alternative" search has stayed active more than a year later — a steady trickle of people who built an inventory in an app that no longer exists to open it in.
Snupps just stopped. No shutdown notice, no migration path — abandoned around 2019, the app and site simply stopped working one day. Whatever collections people had built were stranded with no warning at all.
Three different companies, three different reasons, one identical outcome: the inventory people built disappeared along with the app.
Why this keeps happening
Every one of these apps worked the same way under the hood: your catalog lived on the company's server, not on your phone. That's a normal way to build software, and it's not automatically a bad trade — but it does mean your inventory's lifespan is tied to the company's, not to yours. If they pivot the business, run out of funding, or just stop maintaining the app, the server can go dark and take your data with it, whether or not you're still paying attention.
The tell is usually the same question with different phrasing: does the app need an account? Does it need a live connection to catalog what you photograph? If the answer to either is yes, there's a server between you and your own inventory — and a server is a company decision away from disappearing.
If your app just shut down
There's no universal fix, since each shutdown is different, but a few things are worth trying before you assume everything is gone:
- Open the app and see what's still there. Some shutdowns cut off new processing or account sync but leave locally cached data visible for a while — check before you assume total loss.
- Look for a shutdown notice or migration post from the company. Some companies (Centriq's userbase was partly absorbed by Homer, for example) publish a farewell post with an export or import path for exactly this moment. Others, like Snupps, offer nothing — check, but don't count on it.
- Screenshot anything still visible. Photos, item names, box locations — even a screenshot beats nothing if a real export isn't offered.
- If nothing is recoverable, treat it as a fresh start. The frustrating but honest answer: rebuild as you rediscover boxes, rather than trying to reconstruct the whole thing from memory in one sitting.
Choosing an app that can't do this to you again
The pattern above points to one question worth asking before you commit to any inventory app: where does my catalog actually live? On the company's server, or on my phone?
That's the whole design decision behind Snap & Store. Capture photos and video of what's going into a box — narrate if you want — and on-device AI catalogs the items, each with its own photo; you review, tweak, done. The AI runs on your phone, not in a cloud account, which means there's no server standing between you and your own inventory in the first place. There's no account to lose access to, either — nothing to sync, nothing to log into, nothing a company can revoke.
The honest trade in the other direction: on-device means your inventory lives on your phone the way your camera roll does, so some cloud conveniences — like a teammate browsing your catalog from a different device on their own login — aren't part of the design. For one household's boxes and bins, we think that's the right side of the trade. More on how the on-device flow works.
FAQ
Does Snap & Store need an account? No. There's nothing to sign up for and nothing that can be revoked or locked out later.
What happens to my inventory if Snap & Store shuts down someday? Your photos, video, and catalog already live on your phone, not on a server — so there's no account cutoff to worry about, the way there was with Encircle. Whatever you've captured stays exactly where it already was: on your device.
Is this the same as ToteScan or Encircle? No — ToteScan is a different, currently active app; this comparison is specifically about Encircle's discontinued consumer product, plus Centriq and Snupps, all of which shut down or cut off users.
Can I use it if I switched from one of these apps? Yes — there's no migration wizard to promise, but there doesn't need to be one. Stick a label on each box you still have, capture what's inside, and an afternoon of recapturing covers more ground than most abandoned inventories ever did.
If you've been burned by an app like this before, read more on why an on-device inventory can't be discontinued out from under you — or just start fresh: your first 3 boxes are free, forever, on iOS and Android.