Roughly 80% of warranties are never claimed
Not because the products don't break — because by the time they do, the receipt is a thermal-paper ghost, nobody remembers whether the coverage was one year or two, and the serial number is on a sticker behind a 300-pound appliance. The warranty was real money you already paid for. It just expired in a junk drawer.
Warranty tracker apps exist to fix exactly this, and some are genuinely useful. Honest rundown first — you should use something, even if it's not us.
Then we'll talk about why most warranties will keep going unclaimed anyway, and what actually fixes it.
The best warranty trackers, honestly ranked
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Warranty Keeper — best free dedicated trackerFree on iOS and Android with unlimited items: add the product, snap the receipt, set the coverage dates, and it notifies you before a warranty expires, with everything backed up to the cloud. A solid 4.3-ish rating and a clean, single-purpose design. The trade-off is the flip side of "free and simple" — it's a small app from a small developer, and warranties are all it does.
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Sortly — best if you want a full home inventoryA polished inventory system with photos, custom folders, QR labels, and CSV/PDF exports. Warranty dates are just fields you add to items. It started life as a business tool and prices like one: the free tier caps at 100 items and one user, exports require a paid plan, and paid plans start around $49/month — fine for a small business, absurd for tracking the toaster.
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Itemtopia — best for cataloging what you ownA lightweight home-inventory app with receipts, warranties, reminders, and custom fields — a favorite for collections like comics, sneakers, and heirlooms. The free tier only covers your first handful of items; unlimited runs about $20/year. Strong on cataloging, lighter on the build-a-claim-paper-trail use case.
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Encircle — best for insurance claims (not really for you)The tool restoration pros use to document a house after a fire or flood, room by room, for the insurer. If you see it in your life, something bad already happened. It's here because people find it when searching for inventory apps — it's excellent at what it does, and what it does is not everyday warranty tracking.
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A spreadsheet or Notion — best free flexible optionHonestly viable: a table with product, purchase date, coverage end, and a link to a photo of the receipt beats the junk drawer by a mile. The catch is the same as every DIY system — no reminders unless you build them, no shared access unless you set it up, and it only works as long as the one person who made it keeps it up.
Bottom line: if you just want warranty alerts, Warranty Keeper is free and does the job. If you want a whole-house inventory and will pay for it, Sortly. If you're cataloging a collection, Itemtopia. Any of them beats finding out the fridge was covered — last month.
Why warranties will still go unclaimed
Here's the uncomfortable truth about every option above: the app isn't the hard part. The system around it is. Warranties go unclaimed for reasons a single-purpose tracker doesn't touch:
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The logging never happensA warranty tracker only knows what you enter, and the entry moment — standing in the kitchen with the box and the receipt — is exactly when you're least in the mood for data entry. If the app is one more single-purpose thing to remember, it quietly becomes the junk drawer with a login.
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The claim needs more than a dateWhen you actually file, support asks for the receipt, the serial number, and the model — in one conversation. An expiry alert without the paperwork attached just tells you what you're about to lose.
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The other person in the houseYou bought the washer; your spouse is home when it floods. If the warranty lives in an app on your phone under your account, it might as well be in your head. Coverage is a household asset — the whole household needs to reach it.
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Warranties are one lane of the same problemThe receipt you can't find is the same failure as the gift card you forgot and the registration you missed. We've written the same story about subscription trackers and car maintenance apps: single-lane apps solve single lanes, and households don't leak money in single lanes.
The fix isn't a better warranty app. It's making the warranty part of a system your family already opens for everything else.
Warranties inside the family command center
Squirreld treats warranties as one of eleven categories in one secure place — which changes who uses it and whether it stays current:
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Snap it once, donePhotograph the receipt, add the serial number and coverage window, and the claim paperwork lives with the product record — ready the day something breaks.
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A countdown you can seeEvery warranty shows a visual countdown on its coverage window, and reminders nudge you before it closes — so the month-11 failure becomes a claim, not a repair bill.
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The whole household can reach itWarranties live in your shared family account, next to the gift cards, memberships, and the Glovebox — whoever is home when it breaks can pull up the coverage.
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One habit instead of five appsBecause the same place holds the vault, the pet records, and the recipes, it's the app your family actually opens — which is the only thing that keeps any tracking system alive.
If you want the step-by-step, we've written a full guide to never missing a warranty claim. And it's all on the same foundation as everything in Squirreld: encrypted with AWS KMS, no bank login, and your data isn't the product.
The honest recommendation
If warranties are your only gap, install Warranty Keeper today — it's free, and it will pay for itself the first time an appliance dies inside its coverage window.
But if the real problem is the drawer — the receipts, the gift cards, the registrations, and the fact that nobody but you knows where any of it lives — a warranty app is one more lane on a highway your household doesn't have. That's the problem Squirreld was built for: the claim ready before the thing breaks, in the place your family already looks.
Squirreld is built by a dad in Colorado who got tired of losing money to junk drawers. Questions? We actually answer them.
Every receipt, serial number, and coverage countdown — stored next to everything else your household runs on.
Start tracking your warranties