Built in Bristol, for the way UK homes actually work.
Stead is a home admin app made by one person in evenings and weekends, with the conviction that the boring bits of running a home deserve a calm, considered tool, not another notification factory.
Where this came from.
I bought my first house in Bristol, a two up two down end terrace in the south of the city, and within six months I had a folder, three apps, two spreadsheets, a notebook, and a pinned email thread, all trying to track what the house needed.
The boiler service was a calendar reminder. The EPC was a PDF in Downloads. The smart bulbs were in five separate apps. The energy bills were a thread on Octopus. The council tax band, the planning permission for the side return I was thinking about, the rough date the windows were last replaced — all somewhere different, none in the same place.
Every existing app I tried was either too American, too generic, or too narrow. Hammock and Landlord Studio assume you're a landlord. Notion assumes you'll build the thing yourself. Smart home apps don't know about gas safety. The gov.uk energy ratings register doesn't talk to anything. There's no app that knows when your boiler needs an annual service, that 105 is the number for a power cut, or how to serve a tenancy notice the right way.
So I started writing one. The first version was an Expo prototype I built across one weekend in March 2026 to test whether the idea held water. By the end of the month it had real EPC data flowing through it. By April it had three modes, a document vault, a smart diagnostics chat, and was deployed at stead.space.
The version you're testing now was built over several months with countless hours of focused development time. I'm not a full time engineer, and Stead exists because the tooling for solo builders has finally caught up with the ambition. The aim isn't to compete with venture-backed homecare apps. The aim is to build something that works for the way a UK household actually thinks.
Who's building this.
I'm David. I'm a contract accountant by trade, currently working in finance operations at a UK pet care group, with a background in Excel, Power Query, Power BI, and the kind of operational systems work that nobody photographs for a magazine but quietly keeps things running.
I've been building Stead solo, in evenings and at weekends, for the last few months. There's no team, no funding, no investors, no co-founder. The whole thing — design, code, copy, this website — is one person and an unreasonable amount of coffee.
My professional background is the reason Stead exists. Years of cleaning up other people's data, building reporting hubs, untangling reconciliations, and watching what happens when household admin meets professional admin (badly) gave me a strong opinion about how this kind of tool should feel. Calm, accurate, trustworthy, and quiet. Not gamified. Not algorithmic. Not pestering you with red dots.
If you've been invited to the closed beta, you probably already know me. If you haven't, hello, and thanks for reading. I'm reachable on [email protected] for anything Stead related.
What Stead tries to be.
Six rules I check every design decision against. They don't always win, but they always get a hearing.
UK first, not retrofitted.
Real EPC data from the gov.uk register. Real emergency numbers. Real legal frameworks for England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland coming, written by people who actually know those regimes.
Calm by default.
No streaks, no badges, no leaderboards, no notification spam. Stead nags you when a certificate is about to expire and shuts up the rest of the time. Boring is a feature.
Your data is yours.
Stored on European servers with strict per account access controls. Exportable on request. Deletable on request. No selling, no advertising, no "anonymised partner data". If Stead ever shuts down, you get an export.
Honest pricing.
Free tier that's actually useful, not a teaser. Paid tier priced where it makes sense for what it does, not what the market will bear. No dark patterns at the cancel button.
The house remembers.
Most apps treat a property as a list of tasks for the current occupant. Stead treats the house itself as the source of truth. When you move out, the property profile, certificates, and history can transfer to whoever takes over.
Solve the boring stuff first.
Maintenance reminders, document storage, certificate expiry warnings. The unsexy backbone before the shiny extras. Get the foundation right, then layer on top.
From sketch to closed beta.
How the project has progressed from idea to something testable.
March 2026 — The first weekend
Initial Expo prototype scaffolded across a single weekend. Three modes (homeowner, renter, landlord), a basic dashboard, and a maintenance list. No backend, no real data, just a shape.
Late March 2026 — Real data arrives
Energy ratings looked up live from the gov.uk register. Backend wired up with strict per account access. Document vault with PDF and image upload. Onboarding refined to feel less like a form and more like a conversation.
April 2026 — Diagnostics and polish
Smart diagnostics chat added, with multi turn conversation that understands the property's specifics. Energy tracking with tailored insights. Smart home automation builder across 38 providers. Renter rights and landlord obligations content added for England and Wales.
April 2026 — Property knowledge layer
Big rethink. The property itself became the centre of everything. Rooms, appliances, certificates, automations, energy history — all attached to the home, not to your account. The "house remembers" principle made real.
May 2026 — Closed beta
Friends, family, and a handful of trusted testers. Marketing site goes live at stead.space. Feedback loop opens. Public beta and Stripe billing planned for summer 2026.
What it's built with.
For the technically curious. Skip if you're here for the home admin.
App layer
Expo (React Native). One codebase that ships to web, iOS, and Android. Currently deployed as a web app for closed beta, with native builds queued for phase two. TypeScript throughout. Expo Router for navigation. React Native Paper components, customised heavily.
The Deep Sanctuary theme tokens are shared between the app and this marketing site, which is why the two feel like the same product even though they're built differently.
Backend
Supabase, hosted in the EU. Postgres with row level security so users can only ever see their own data. Auth via email and password, plus Google sign in. Storage for document uploads with virus scanning. Edge functions for anything that needs server side logic, including the EPC lookup and the diagnostics chat.
Roughly 30 tables, all with RLS policies. The schema is open source friendly and can be exported for portability.
Smart features
Smart diagnostics, tailored energy insights, and the smart home automation builder use Anthropic's Claude Haiku via Supabase edge functions. Each request is enriched with the user's property profile so the answers are tailored, not generic. Rate limited per user per 24 hours to keep costs predictable.
No data is shared with third parties beyond what's needed to generate the response, and no training data is retained by the model provider.
EPC integration
The EPC auto lookup hits the official gov.uk EPC register for the address you provide. The full certificate (90+ fields) is stored on the property profile, including SAP score, fabric details, heating system, and improvement recommendations. A separate Railway service renders the official PDF on demand.
This marketing site
Static HTML, hand-written CSS, a sprinkle of vanilla JavaScript for the theme toggle and mobile menu. No framework, no build step. The whole site is under 200KB across all pages. Deployed to Vercel with the custom domain pointing to it.
Reasoning: the marketing site doesn't need a SPA. It needs to be fast, indexable by search engines, and easy to edit. Static HTML is the simplest answer that works.
What's not included yet
No analytics yet (Plausible is on the list). No error tracking yet (Sentry queued). No CI/CD pipeline beyond Vercel's auto deploy. No automated testing (manual testing only during closed beta). All of these are deliberate decisions to ship the product before bolting on the apparatus.
What Stead isn't trying to be.
Equal in importance to what it is. Worth being clear up front.
Not a property management platform. If you have 50 rentals across three regions, you need Hammock or Landlord Studio. Stead's landlord mode is sized for one to ten properties and is opinionated about UK compliance, not multi-region book-keeping at scale.
Not legal advice. The renter rights and landlord obligations content is well-researched, written for England and Wales, and updated when laws change. It is not a substitute for a solicitor, Shelter, or Citizens Advice when something serious is happening.
Not a smart home hub. Stead helps you build automations across providers, but it doesn't replace your hub or your individual provider apps. Hive's app is still the best place to control your Hive thermostat. Stead is the place that knows your boiler needs servicing.
Not a productivity app. No to-do lists, no Kanban, no projects. Stead has tasks because houses generate tasks. It doesn't try to be a place to plan your week.
Not a social network. No feed, no comments, no likes, no community. Quiet by design.
How to reach me.
For anything Stead related — feedback, bug reports, feature requests, questions about the roadmap, partnership conversations — email [email protected]. I read every email myself, usually within a couple of days.
For closed beta access — beta is invite only for now. Get on the list and you'll hear from me when public beta opens, expected later in 2026.
For press and media — same address. Happy to chat about why solo software for the UK market matters and what AI assisted development means for the indie dev landscape.
For data subject requests — see the privacy page for how to exercise your rights under UK GDPR.
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