Short answers about what ChoreStash is, what it costs, and what happens to your household's data. Longer walkthrough on the how it works page.
The app is free, and stays free: every chore, list, reward and streak, on as many devices as you like, with no advertising, no trial and no subscription. Family sync between phones is free today as well. When the phone apps launch it becomes a one-time purchase of $6.99 for the whole household — one person buys, everyone they invite is covered, and every household already syncing keeps it free.
No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address. You open the app, choose a 4-digit PIN for the admin screen, and start. If you want the same household on several phones, you share a family code and an invite link — still no account.
It works for any household. Each household chooses what it calls the people in it — members, kids, housemates, or anything you type — and the starter chores are ordinary household jobs rather than children's tasks. Adults can have their own rewards, different from anyone else's.
Yes. Lists are a tab of their own, shared with everyone in the household — groceries, packing, anything. You can paste a list someone sent you in a message and each line becomes an item, with bullets and numbering stripped. Ticking something off moves it to the bottom, struck through, so what is left to get stays at the top.
Yes. A chore can repeat every day, on chosen weekdays, or on chosen dates each month. A chore set for the 31st falls to the last day of a shorter month rather than being skipped.
Yes. Set a chore to take turns and pick who is in the rotation. It passes to the next person each time the chore comes round — daily, weekly or monthly — and only appears on the list of whoever is up. Nobody has to remember who did it last, and because whose turn it is depends only on the date, every phone in the household agrees without needing to be online.
No. Points keep adding up across the week, month and year. Most chore apps reset weekly; this one does not, so a long saving-up goal is possible. A separate weekly streak bonus rewards doing a chore on every day it was due, sized by how hard the chore is.
Yes. The app is stored on the device and runs with no connection. Changes made offline catch up automatically when a device is back online, if family sync is on.
By default everything stays on the device, and nothing is sent anywhere. If you turn on family sync, the data is encrypted on your phone before it leaves, with a key generated on the device that travels only inside your invite link. We cannot read your names, chores, lists or points, and neither could anyone who obtained the stored data. What the server can see is that a change happened and when — not what it was or who it was about.
No email, no real names, no birthdays, no photos, no location, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Nothing is sold or shared. The app asks for a first name or nickname and actively discourages full names.
Not yet. ChoreStash runs in the browser today and can be added to a phone's home screen, where it behaves like an app and works offline. Native App Store and Google Play versions are in progress.
There is no limit imposed by the app. Each person gets their own profile, colour and chore list, and optionally a 4-digit PIN so nobody else can tick off their chores or spend their points.
Whoever holds the admin PIN. Points only land once a chore has been approved, so nothing is awarded by simply ticking a box. Reward requests are approved the same way, and the app never touches money — you buy any gift card yourself.
Yes. Turn on family sync in Settings and you get a family code and an invite link to open on the other phones. Every device then stays in step: chores get marked done on one and approved on another.
Yes, and it is scheduled differently from a chore on purpose. A chore repeats on a calendar; maintenance repeats from when it was last done — change the furnace filter two weeks late and the next one moves two weeks late too. Anything overdue turns up on everyone's Today screen. Each job keeps a service history with the date, what it cost, who did it and the mileage, so the record outlives the reminder. Mileage is shown as context and never triggers anything, because nothing here knows what the odometer reads today.
Yes. A date is anything that happens on a day rather than on a rota: the dentist, the MOT, a passport that runs out, a birthday. Each one decides for itself how far ahead it starts showing up — a week for an appointment, two months for a passport — so the urgent thing is never buried behind the one that nags. A yearly date comes round on the same day every year and is never late; a one-off that has passed says how many days late it is. A date can belong to the whole household or to one person.
No, and deliberately not. Everybody already has a calendar and nobody wants to move to a new one, so there is no month grid, no times-of-day column and no invitations. What there is instead is the handful of dates that belong to the household rather than to somebody's working week, sitting next to the chores and upkeep they actually affect.
It does budgeting, and it will never connect to your bank. You set a monthly budget per category and log what you spend — typed in, pasted, or read straight out of the CSV your bank exports. The file is opened on your phone and nothing is uploaded. A bank connection would mean handing your credentials to a third party and would make the encryption promise untrue, so it is not an option we have left out for now; it is one we will not add. Rows are filed by memory rather than by guess: a shop you have put in Groceries before goes to Groceries, because you said so, and anything unrecognised goes to a fallback category you pick. Every batch is shown to you grouped, with its totals, before a single entry is written. The month is the unit and nothing rolls over, and money spent on home and car maintenance appears in the budget automatically without being typed twice.
Yes, and it is the one part of the app nobody else controls. Each person adds their own — a run, eight glasses of water a day, twenty minutes of reading, the gym three times a week. Nobody approves it and it earns no points on its own. A day counts once however many times you log it, except for a daily amount like water, where the day counts when the amount is actually reached. You can set yourself a reward for hitting the week, and somebody with the admin PIN can make that reward worth points.
Yes. Any workout counted in sessions can carry a training log. It asks once where you train — at a gym or at home — and then offers the movements you will actually do: push, pull, legs, upper, lower and cardio at a gym; bodyweight, dumbbells and cardio at home. The point of it is the line at the top of each movement: last time · 62.5 kg × 8, 8, 6, with those numbers already in the boxes so beating them is one tap. Cardio is recorded in distance and minutes instead, and kilograms or pounds and kilometres or miles are converted rather than relabelled when you switch.
Yes to both. Settings has a backup you can download at any time, which restores everything including your history. If sync is on, one tap deletes the household's data from the server.