There are plenty of chore apps. This one takes on the hard part: how siblings get along.
I built it for my own children, aged 5 and 9, on an old tablet propped up in the kitchen. Below is the thinking behind every decision — so you know what you're getting and, more importantly, so you can use it properly.
Every chore app does the same thing: you put up a list, the child ticks, they get points. It works for a week. Then the child gets bored, and you're left with one more app nobody opens.
And that isn't the problem at home anyway. The problem is that they argue. Who left the mess, who did more, why is he allowed and I'm not. That's where you lose your energy as a parent — not on the bins.
Team Fam has the ordinary lists, because they're useful. But the reason it's worth using is what's built around them.
There are chores that only count when both children tap them. Each has their own button. If one taps and the other doesn't, nobody gets anything.
The points aren't split — each of them gets the full amount.
The effect is immediate: one can no longer do the work while the other takes the points, nor tick on their sibling's behalf. Both have to be there. And for that to happen, they have to go looking for each other.
You can mark a day they fought on. Both lose points — no matter who started. Only you can do it; the children don't have the button.
Punishing only the “guilty” one seems fair, but it has an ugly effect: you have them telling on each other, and it turns you into a judge, several times a day. When both lose, both have an interest in stopping before it starts.
The app counts the days in a row without a single fight and shows them. At a number you choose, both get a bonus.
This does more than the penalty. Fear of punishment teaches them to hide the fight. A streak built over two weeks is something they don't want to break — and they start reining themselves in, so as not to lose it.
This is the one setting worth more than ten seconds of thought, because it's a parenting choice, not a preference.
Whatever isn't spent by Sunday is gone. It forces a decision every week: spend now on something small, or save until Sunday for something bigger?
Right for younger children. At five or six, a week has a beginning and an end they can hold in their head. A month is too far away to mean anything.
A longer horizon, so bigger rewards. The child can have a bad day without losing everything.
Right from about nine or ten, when they start to understand that something expensive takes patience.
Nothing is lost. They can save for months for something genuinely big.
It teaches patience best, but it has a cost: with no deadline at all, the pressure to do something today disappears. It works best if there's also a big, visible reward they're heading towards.
You can change it any time, from the parents' app. The whole app adapts — including what the children see on their screen.
Our advice: start with weekly. It's the shortest learning loop — the child sees the link between what they do and what they get in a few days, not a few weeks. Move to monthly when you see them start postponing a reward by themselves to reach a better one.
A five-year-old and a nine-year-old don't need the same screen.
The younger one gets big text, big icons and few words per line. They manage on their own because they recognise the picture, not because they read. The older one gets normal text and more information at once. Giant letters would make them feel treated like a baby — and they'd stop opening it.
Each has their own colour and icon, which colour the whole app when they're on screen. A child who can't read finds their screen by colour and picture, not by the written name.
Tasks sit in three groups: morning, afternoon, evening. The app highlights the group that matches the time of day by itself.
A long list of fifteen things discourages a five-year-old before they start. Five things, right now, is doable. And the ticks clear themselves at midnight — every day starts clean, with no leftovers from yesterday.
All the rest of the parents' app shows the configuration: what each child should do. The “Week” page shows what actually happened — a grid of the last seven days for each child, morning, afternoon and evening.
Under the grid there are two or three sentences in plain words, not percentages thrown at the screen: which part of the day is going well and which is falling behind, what most often goes unticked, and whether this week is better or worse than the one before.
At the top it says on how many of the seven days something was ticked at all, and when the last tick was. If nobody has ticked anything for a few days, it tells you straight. It's the most useful piece of information in the whole app: a chore system doesn't die loudly, it simply stops being opened — and if nobody tells you, you find out a month later.
Every task, chore and mission has a row of seven days — M Tu W Th F Sa Su. You switch off the ones that don't apply. “Check what's in my school bag” no longer appears on Saturday; “fold the laundry” can appear only on Sunday.
This isn't a convenience, it's a condition for the system to mean anything. If the list contains something every day that obviously doesn't apply, the child learns to tick without reading — and from that moment the ticks say nothing, neither to them nor to you.
The end-of-day bonus adjusts itself: on Saturday only what's scheduled for Saturday is asked for. Anyone who doesn't want the complication touches nothing — by default, everything appears every day, exactly as before.
Names, tasks and points sit on a server in the European Union, in Frankfurt. Each family is isolated from the others at the database level, not through code that could be written wrong. We don't ask for and don't keep anything else about the children.
This matters and is rarely done properly. The kitchen screen never signs out — it would be unusable otherwise. But it doesn't have your password on it.
It gets a kind of badge, with which it can do exactly three things: see the list, tick, and add an event. It can't change prices, it can't delete anything, it can't see another family and it can't touch your account.
If the screen goes missing or is stolen, you switch it off from your phone and it becomes useless on the spot. You don't have to change a single password.
If points reset weekly, the child can never save for something expensive. If they don't reset at all, they never learn that points get spent or lost. The piggy bank reconciles the two.
The child moves points from the current week into the piggy bank themselves. What's in there never resets. They pick a goal from the rewards and see how far off it is every time, plus an estimate in weeks. They can take it back out any time, if they change their mind.
One detail that matters: if the goal is too far away, the app says so and nudges them to pick something smaller. A six-month goal doesn't train an eight-year-old's patience — it makes them give up.
Up to here, everything came from above: the parent writes the lists, the child ticks them. A system in which the child has no say is a system they put up with, not one they join.
So they can suggest: a new chore, a reward, something in their routine, a mission for both of them. They pick from the same suggestion libraries you have — so a child who can barely write manages fine — or they write their own idea.
The suggestion goes nowhere. It appears on your side, on the “Children” page. You can reword it, set the price, choose the days, and only then does it join the list. Or you say no, with a word of explanation they see on their screen next to their idea.
Two things the child cannot do, and they matter: they can't set the price — the suggestion has no points field at all — and they can't approve anything themselves. They can have at most twelve ideas waiting, so you don't open the app and find forty.
Every chore app adds. The list grows for ever, becomes noise, and the family gives up around week three.
Here, when a task has been ticked enough days in a row — 21, by default — the app suggests taking it off. It doesn't delete it: it moves to “what they already know” and you can put it back with one tap if the habit breaks. You decide, always.
The reason isn't just tidiness. In an experiment that became a classic (Lepper, Greene and Nisbett, 1973), children who were promised a reward for something they already enjoyed doing did it significantly less afterwards. Points are good for what's unpleasant. They become harmful at exactly the moment the habit has formed and you keep paying for it.
“Screen” means anything with a browser: an old tablet, a retired phone, a laptop left on the sideboard. It connects once with a code and stays connected for ever.
When you connect it, you say who it's for. “All the children” is the screen put somewhere they walk past anyway — kitchen, hallway, by the door. It asks “Who are you?” every time and returns to the question by itself, so one doesn't tick on the other's list. Set to one child — their phone or tablet — it opens straight onto them and never asks again. On a personal device the question is pure noise: the answer is always the same.
These aren't two apps, nor two things to learn. It's the same screen, with one question answered once. You can change it any time.
The recommendation stays the shared screen, and not out of convenience. A screen in the kitchen is public: the list is visible, the parent glances at it in passing, siblings see each other's ticks. The “Together” part — the missions that only count when both tap them, the streak of days without a fight — assumes they're in the same room, at the same screen. On two separate phones, that part loses its point. The personal screen is for an older child, a house with two floors, or parents in different homes.
Mum and dad each have their own account, with their own email and password. Both see everything and both can change everything. The second joins with a six-character code, generated by the first from Settings → Parents — just like connecting a screen, without depending on email.
It isn't just convenience. The alternative is one giving the other their password, which is exactly what the rest of the app is built to avoid. And there's something else: chore apps die most often because a single parent carries them. If the system belongs to one of you, the other ignores it, and the children quickly learn who to ask.
One button downloads everything we have about your family, in a file any program can read. Another button deletes everything, for good, without asking anyone's permission and without waiting for an email reply. Both are in Settings → Your data.
What we keep, where it lives and who sees it are set out at length in the data page — written for a parent, not a lawyer.
A kitchen screen can't afford to show “network error” at seven in the morning, when the child is rushing to school.
Ticks are saved on the spot, on the screen, and go up by themselves when the connection comes back. If you switch the screen off in the meantime, everything ticked stays saved and goes up on restart. A discreet mark in the corner tells you how many things are waiting — that's all.
The kids' screen has a 🔍 button with four steps, from smaller than normal to very large. If it sits on a cupboard and the children see it from two metres away, the large step changes everything.
Pinch-to-zoom is deliberately blocked. A five-year-old skews it by accident in the first week and is left with a screen they can't get out of. The button has fixed steps and always comes back to normal.
Advice from using it, not from a manual:
The explanations above are the reasoning behind how the app is built, based on how it works in our house. They are not scientific research conclusions and we don't present them as such. Every child is different — adjust the numbers until they fit yours.