Switching

A Sortly Alternative Without the $49 a Month

You are paying $49 a month to keep a list of your own things. Sortly Advanced gives you 500 items for that price, as checked October 2026, and their own support tells personal users the service is built mainly for businesses. InventoryByHand is $44, one time, with no item cap — and your list lives in a file you keep.

If you are here, you already did the hard part: you made the list. The question now is whether you keep paying rent on it. At $49 a month, Sortly Advanced costs $588 in its first year and $1,764 over three years, against $44 once for InventoryByHand, as checked October 2026. And the $24 a month annual figure you may have seen is a first-year promo that renews higher — about $470 a year in year 2 — so the honest comparison is the $49 monthly rate, not the promo.

There is also a plain fit question. Sortly's Free tier holds 100 items, which most homes pass quickly. The homeowner tier at $49 a month holds 500 items. InventoryByHand has no item cap, so a house with a garage, an attic, and a shed does not run into a ceiling. And because there is no account and no server copy here, your list is not held on someone else's system while you pay — it is on your device, and in the exported file you keep.

What moves, honestly, in two steps

Moving from Sortly is two steps, and we will not pretend it is one click, because it is not — for anyone.

1. Step 1: your Sortly CSV brings every item, price, tag and note — we match columns by name, including your custom fields.
2. Step 2: Sortly only releases your actual photo files through its Dropbox export — bring that folder too and every photo lands with its item. Anyone who promises one click for both is not telling you the whole story.

What does not move on its own: the CSV carries photo links that die if you cancel Sortly. That is why step 2 matters, and why it must come before you cancel. Do the Dropbox export first, check that the photos are in the folder, and only then close the Sortly account. Nothing is lost if the two steps are done in that order.

What you get here, in the same words

The same field set an insurer asks for: brand, make, and model; room; serial and model number; purchase date; purchase price; replacement cost today; age and condition; and proof of ownership, with a photo of each item in place. A room-by-room walkthrough on your phone, a printed insurance report with one photo per item, purchase and replacement totals by room and category, and a full spreadsheet export any time. Install it to your Home Screen, work with no internet, and keep the file where you choose. Your insurer and your policy still decide any claim — we make the record claim-ready, and we say so plainly.

The math, at Sortly's own published prices