Master Household Preventative Maintenance Without Spreadsheets
Maintaining a home involves dozens of interdependent systems: HVAC seasonal inspections, water heater flushing, gutter cleaning, appliance filter replacements, and contractor estimates. Most homeowners rely on fragmented calendar reminders, paper receipts, or ad-hoc spreadsheets that fail to preserve maintenance history.
Upkeep is a native macOS application engineered to bring order, clarity, and accountability to household maintenance. Built natively with Swift 6, SwiftUI, and AppKit, Upkeep tracks schedules, catalogs equipment lifespans, manages contractor bids, and calculates replacement timelines—all stored locally on your Mac.
Key Capabilities
1. Flexible Maintenance Inventory
- Four Schedule Types:
- Recurring: Timed cycles (every N days, weeks, months, or years) with smart rescheduling.
- Seasonal: Annual service windows (e.g., May 25 – July 7) matched to optimal weather.
- To-Do: Single-event repairs and household upgrades with hard due dates.
- Ideas: Undated project wishlists for future renovations, complete with research notes, contractor estimates, and follow-ups.
- Supply & Consumable Tracking: Monitor stock levels for furnace filters, water softener salt, smoke detector batteries, and pool chemicals with reorder alerts.
- Custom Visuals: Assign dedicated SF Symbol icons and categories to each maintenance item.
2. Multi-Event Timed Schedules
Complex maintenance often spans multiple milestones. Upkeep allows breaking single items into ordered sub-events:
- Lawn Care Cycles: Track 13 sequential seasonal applications across spring, summer, and autumn.
- HVAC Inspections: Break annual service into distinct electrical, plumbing, and mechanical inspection dates.
- Each sub-event expands independently on the dashboard and detail views while logging to a unified parent record.
3. Comprehensive Maintenance Journal & Progress Logs
- Detailed History: Record completions with exact date, contractor or DIY performer, total cost, and satisfaction ratings (1–5 stars).
- Progress Logs: Log interim progress (e.g., ordered parts, inspected foundation) without prematurely resetting recurring schedule timers.
- Attachments: Store invoices, inspection PDFs, warranty scans, and before/after photos directly alongside journal entries.
- Markdown Notes: Keep detailed equipment notes and step-by-step DIY instructions with full Markdown support.
4. Household Health Dashboard & Weather Widget
- Readiness Progress Ring: Instant visual overview of your home’s preventative health and on-track percentage.
- 14-Day Weather Forecast: Localized weather forecasts via Open-Meteo (zero API keys, private, anonymous) based on Core Location geocoding of your home address.
- Weather Hints: Highlights outdoor tasks (gutter clearing, roof inspection, power washing) when optimal weather windows appear.
- Timeline & Spending: 30-day lookahead timeline and expense breakdowns organized by household category.
5. Vendor Management & Contractor Sourcing Engine
- Vendor Directory: Store contact information, account managers, service tags, and customer referral notes. Import directly from macOS Contacts.
- Contractor Sourcing: First-class bid collection engine. Track competitive quotes, proposal PDFs, contractor availability, and decision deadlines.
- One-Click Promotion: Select the winning quote to automatically promote the candidate to your active vendor list.
- Cascade Reassignment: Seamlessly reassign all maintenance items from a retired vendor to their replacement with a single click.
6. Home Profile & Major Mechanical Systems
- Property Record: Track square footage, year built, parcel details, and utility shut-off locations.
- Major Systems Life Cycle: Log install dates, manufacturer brands, model numbers, serials, and estimated lifespans for HVAC, roof, water heaters, and electrical panels.
7. Multi-User Sync & Data Ownership
- Household Sharing: Point Upkeep’s shared directory at iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox to sync seamlessly across family members.
- Atomic File Persistence: Safe JSON storage handled by Swift actors with automatic snapshots and rollback safeguards.
- Zero Cloud Lock-in: 100% of your data remains on your hardware. Export complete HTML maintenance binders for real estate disclosures anytime.
Documentation & Guides
Comprehensive documentation and visual step-by-step walkthroughs are available in our Documentation Hub:
- 📖 Upkeep User Guide & Visual Walkthrough — Complete visual guide to the priority-weighted Health Score, interactive maintenance timeline, multi-event schedules, vendor bid comparisons, and seasonal checklists.
- 🍳 Practical Cookbook & Home Maintenance Recipes — Step-by-step recipes for multi-stage lawn programs, weather-timed exterior applications, contractor RFPs, seasonal winterization checklists, and household cloud sync.
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Platform | macOS 15.0+ (Sequoia) |
| Architecture | Universal Binary (Apple Silicon & Intel x86_64) |
| State Management | Swift 6 @Observable and @MainActor architecture |
| Persistence | File-based JSON actor with automatic local backups (~/.upkeep/) |
| Geocoding | Apple Core Location (local framework) |
| Weather API | Open-Meteo (100% anonymous, zero API keys required) |
| Auto-Updates | Sparkle framework with EdDSA cryptographic signatures |
Getting Started
Download Application (.dmg)
Download the latest verified macOS release:
Open the disk image and drag Upkeep to your /Applications folder.
Seamless Over-The-Air Updates
Upkeep includes built-in Sparkle auto-updates. You will be automatically notified whenever a new release is published to tanager.dev:
Feed URL: https://tanager.dev/appcasts/upkeep/appcast.xml