How ChoreStash works

1 Put it on your phone

Open chorestash.com in Safari on an iPhone or iPad, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, use Chrome's menu → Install app.

It then opens like any other app — full screen, works offline, no App Store needed.

2 Set up, once

Tap Get started and pick a 4-digit PIN. Then add everyone in the household — a first name or nickname, an emoji, a color.

Seven chores and six rewards are already there to get you going. Change them under Manage: what the chores are, what they're worth, and what everyone can spend points on. The rewards are the bit worth thinking about.

3 Hand it round

Tap Exit, and they tap their own face. They see today's chores and tap one to mark it done.

You can give each person their own PIN so nobody else can tick off their chores — that's under Manage, in the members tab.

4 Approve, once a day

Finished chores wait for you in Review. Approve or decline — points only land once you've said yes. A red badge tells you how many are waiting.

5 Points build up, they choose

Points keep adding up all year — no weekly reset. Everyone browses the reward store themselves and see exactly how far off each thing is, which is the part that actually motivates them.

When they redeem a gift card, you get a request. You buy the card yourself — the app never touches money.

6 Streaks are where the magic is

Do a chore on every day it's due in one week and it pays a bonus on top — bigger for harder chores. You set the rates with sliders in Settings.

Miss a day? A streak saver 🛟 repairs it. One is earned for every flawless week, and you can hand them out too.

7 The rest of what a house needs

Chores are the half that repeats on a calendar. Three more things sit under Manage, each with its own clock:

1. Upkeep — the filter, the gutters, the oil change. Scheduled from the day you actually did it rather than from a calendar, so a job done late moves the next one late too. Anything overdue turns up on everyone's Today screen, and each job keeps a service history with what it cost and who did it.
2. Dates — the dentist, the MOT, a passport that runs out, a birthday. Each one decides for itself how far ahead it starts reminding you: a week for an appointment, two months for a passport. A yearly date comes round and is never late; a one-off that has passed says how many days late it is.
3. Money — a monthly budget per category and a log of what you spend, typed in or pasted straight from a bank statement. There is no bank connection and never will be; what you paste is read on the device and sent nowhere. Maintenance costs show up in the budget without being typed twice.

None of it is compulsory. Settings → What this household uses switches any part off, and switching one off hides it without deleting a thing.

8 And the part that is yours alone

The Track tab is the one thing in 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. The exception is a daily amount like water, where the day counts when the eight glasses are actually drunk — so two glasses is a real entry and an unfinished day.

On anything counted in sessions you can also keep a weights and reps log. It asks once where you train and then offers what you will actually do — push, pull, legs, upper, lower and cardio at a gym; bodyweight, dumbbells and cardio at home. The whole point of it is the line at the top: last time · 62.5 kg × 8, 8, 6, with those numbers already sitting in the boxes so doing one more is a single tap.

You can set yourself a reward for hitting your own target — "a long bath", "the good coffee" — and claim it when the week is actually met. Only somebody with the admin PIN can make that reward worth points, so nobody can print the household's currency for themselves.

9 Everyone on their own phone

In Settings → Turn on family sync, tap once and you get a family code, a key, and an invite link. Every device then stays in step: chores get marked done on one phone and approved on another.

Do it in this order on each new phone, or you will end up setting up twice:

1. Open chorestash.com in Safari and Add to Home Screen.
2. Open ChoreStash from the Home Screen icon, and tap Join your family on the first screen.
3. Enter the family code and key from Settings → Invite a device on the first phone.

On iPhone, a Home Screen app has its own private storage, separate from Safari. Join in Safari first and the Home Screen icon opens what looks like a brand-new app — nothing is lost, it just has not joined yet. Joining from inside the installed app is what makes it stick. The invite link always opens Safari, which is why the code and key are the reliable way in.

It's free, needs no account, and everything is encrypted so nobody but your family can read it.