Owning a home is one of those things nobody really teaches you. You close on the place, you get the keys, and suddenly you're responsible for a hundred small things you never thought about: when the furnace filter was last changed, which plumber your neighbor said was reliable, whether that strange noise from the dishwasher is something to worry about, what a sump pump actually does. Most of the time you Google it, half-figure it out, and move on. Years later you realize you've been making the same small decisions over and over with no record of any of them.
That's why I built Tend.
Tend is a home OS that grows with you. It's a mobile app that helps you keep track of your home: the projects you're working on, the appliances you own, the vendors you trust, the reminders you set. It uses AI to help you make better decisions about all of it. Not a calm companion. Not a passive assistant. A tool that builds your homeowner skills over time, so the things that felt overwhelming on day one feel routine by year five.
Why a home OS?
Most home apps fall into one of two camps. They're either feature dumps (eleven tabs, a million toggles, built for someone who already knows what they're doing) or glorified to-do lists that don't actually help when the dishwasher floods at 11 PM.
I wanted something in between. Something that gives new homeowners enough scaffolding to feel competent, gives experienced homeowners a real tracking system, and uses AI to do the things humans hate (researching what a fair price is, remembering when the gutter cleaning happens, figuring out why a noise is happening) without trying to replace the things humans are actually good at (deciding what matters, choosing what to do).
The bet is that homeowners deserve a tool that's on their side as they learn, not one that assumes they already know.
What's in it
Tend has the things you'd expect: projects, appliances, vendors, reminders, documents. Where it gets interesting is the layer on top.
Worth Knowing is a feed of daily insights tuned to your specific home. It reads the weather where you live, what season it is, what's in your project history, and what skill levels you've been building, and writes you a few cards a day about things that actually matter. Not generic content. Stuff specific to your house.
Ask Tend is a chat anchored on your home's real context. When you ask "is this a DIY job or should I call someone?" it knows what's in your home, what you've done before, what your skill level is in that category, and what your local vendor options look like. The answers are useful in a way generic AI chat isn't.
Vendor search pulls in real local pros (plumbers, electricians, painters, landscapers) anchored on your home address, so when you need to hire something out the list is right there, ranked, with phone numbers ready to call.
Inspection and invoice import turn the messy paperwork side of homeownership into structured data. Upload an inspection PDF and Tend pre-fills your appliances, projects, and notes. Upload an invoice and it pulls vendor, work done, and cost into your home history automatically.
There's more: a maintenance report PDF you can generate for buyers or your own records, milestones that reward you for building real skills, and a document library that holds onto warranties and manuals so you can stop digging through your inbox. But the four features above are the ones that change how it feels to be a homeowner.
The road to launch
I built Tend solo over the last several months, mostly nights and weekends, on top of React Native, Supabase, and Anthropic's Claude. I'm not a professional developer. I'm a homeowner who couldn't find the tool I wanted and decided to make it.
The most useful thing I did in the last week of launch prep was hand the app to my mom, who is the opposite of a tech enthusiast, and watch her try to use it cold. She caught five real problems in twenty minutes. The "tend" wordmark on the home screen? She didn't realize it was a button. The vendor search? When it failed, it showed her a developer-style error instead of a useful one. The Worth Knowing feed on a brand-new account? It said "all caught up" when she'd never had a card in the first place. All things I'd have shipped without noticing.
That's the loop. Build, test with real people, fix the things that only surface when someone who didn't build it tries to use it. The version of Tend that's shipping is meaningfully better than the one I would have launched two weeks ago, because someone who'd never seen it before pointed at the parts that didn't make sense.
Where it's going
V1 is a foundation. Tend handles the day-to-day, helps you build skills, keeps your records, and gives you a thoughtful AI to ask questions of. From here the directions I want to take it are clear: deeper skill-building (think guided learning, not just tips), tighter integrations with the tools homeowners actually use (smart home, calendar, finance), and stronger community features so people can learn from each other's projects without it becoming yet another social feed.
But the underlying bet stays the same. Homeowners deserve tools that grow with them. Tend is one of those tools.
About Empty Bar
Tend is the first product from Empty Bar, an umbrella company I'm building to ship thoughtful tools that quietly make hard things easier. More to come from us, but Tend is where we're starting.
If you own a home and want to try Tend when it launches, sign up at tend-homeos.com. We'll let you know the moment it's live on the App Store and Google Play.
Tend is a product of Empty Bar LLC, Hastings, Minnesota.