One tiny app for your whole family. Kids check off chores, earn coins, and cash them in for extra screen time, allowance, or rewards you set. Everything updates on every phone in the family in real time.
And because it runs from a small computer in your own home — not someone else's cloud — your family's data never leaves your house.
One-time price · No subscription · Every update forever · Visual install guide included
Every screen your family will actually use. Tap a tab to jump around. Everything you see updates in real time across every phone and tablet in the house.
Every finished chore, every bonus chore, and every reward request lands in the same place. Approve or reject in one tap. Coins credit or screen time unlocks the moment you tap approve — on your kids' phones, on the kitchen tablet, everywhere.
Get a notification the second they tap "I did it." Handle it while you're waiting in line at pickup. Or leave it for after dinner. Your rules.
Set up rewards that mean something in your house. "Movie night." "Pick dinner." "Stay up 30 minutes late." Give each one a coin price. Kids can request from the menu when they've saved enough.
No more "can I have…?" ten times a day. If it's on the menu and they have the coins, they can ask. If it's not, it's not up for debate.
Some things are bigger than what a coin-a-day gets you. Kids can save toward what they actually want — a new game, a pool pass, a Disney trip the whole family is chasing. Set the coin target, pick who's contributing (one kid or everyone), and watch the progress bar fill up.
Want to give it a boost? Add a parent match — every coin the kid puts in, you add half, or double, or triple. Perfect for family trips where you're chipping in anyway. Turn on approval-required for the big-ticket goals so a kid can't sink their whole balance without you seeing it first.
Point a spare iPad or Android tablet at the family wall and pin Chore Coin. Everyone can see today's chores, everyone's coins, and what's coming up — no more "did you brush your teeth?"
Real screenshots from a real family's install coming soon. These mockups are accurate to how the app looks and behaves today.
Every feature exists because a real family kept saying "wouldn't it be great if…"
Finish all today's chores → unlock an hour of screen time. Simple rule, no daily fights. Kids see exactly what they need to do to earn it.
Bonus chores earn coins. Emptying the dishwasher, taking out the trash, vacuuming — set a coin value and a daily cap so no one grinds the same chore all afternoon.
Movie night, dinner-picker, that new book they've been eyeing — put anything on the reward menu with a coin price. Kids ask, you approve, done.
A Nintendo, a pool pass, the family Disney trip. Kids save toward what they actually want, with an optional parent match — you chip in half a coin, or double, or triple, per coin they add.
Approve a chore on your phone; your kid's iPad updates in under a second. Notifications tell you when there's something to approve, and tell kids the second you approve it.
iPhone, iPad, Android, laptop, kitchen tablet — Chore Coin runs in the browser and installs to any home screen. No App Store, no family sharing headaches, no in-app-purchase confusion.
Works inside iOS Assistive Access so your youngest can use their first phone with just Chore Coin, Phone, Messages, and Music — no wide-open internet.
Chore Coin lives in the same neighborhood as a handful of other family apps. Every one of them is a real product with real fans — none of this is a gotcha. The point is to help you match your family's actual needs to the right tool. Head-to-head with the closest overlap first, then a shorter look at three others.
| 🪙 Chore Coin | Skylight Calendar 2 + Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Price |
$20 once
no subscription, ever
|
$299.99 device + $79/year
rewards feature requires Calendar Plus
|
| 5-year cost | $20 |
$694.99
$299.99 hardware + $79 × 5
|
| Where your family's data lives |
🏠 In your house
never leaves, no accounts on our servers
|
☁️ Skylight's cloud |
| Devices it runs on |
iPhone, iPad, Android, Chromebook, any laptop — any browser
use the phones + tablets you already own
|
15" Skylight touchscreen
+ mobile app for setup
|
| Chore checklist for kids | ✓ Base + bonus chores, day-of-week rules | ✓ Chores + routines |
| Rewards you set (movie night, treat, etc.) | ✓ Unlimited, included | Plus only ($79/yr) |
| Screen time earned from chores | ✓ 1 🪙 = 5 min, auto-granted | — |
| Cash allowance from chores | ✓ 1 🪙 = $0.25 by default | — |
| Savings goals with parent match | ✓ Individual + family goals, adjustable match | — |
| Push notifications to parents | ✓ Native web push on all devices | Not native to the display |
| Family shared calendar |
—
(Chore Coin is chore-focused)
|
✓ Central feature |
| Works if your internet is down | ✓ Runs on your home Wi-Fi alone | Needs the cloud |
| You own the software forever | ✓ All future updates free | Subscription ongoing to keep rewards working |
You want a permanent family calendar on the wall as the main event, love the idea of a dedicated always-on display, and the $299 up front plus $79/year for the rewards side is comfortable. Their shared calendar and meal-planner are the real draw.
You want chores + screen time + allowance + savings goals as the core loop, prefer running it on devices you already own, don't want a monthly bill for something your kids use every day, and care that your family's data stays with your family.
Three other apps parents ask us about — each solves a different slice of the "how do we handle chores?" question. Here's the shortest fair way to say where each one is different from Chore Coin.
Launched mid-2026. Kitchen-counter touchscreen bundling shared calendar, chores, photos, and — when linked to Greenlight's kid debit card — real allowance payments. Essentially Skylight's playbook plus a money layer.
Chores → real money on a kid Visa debit card. Very much a financial-literacy product first, chore tracker second.
Mobile-first chores + rewards + allowance app. Solid free tier for a very small family; the paywall shows up quickly beyond that.
A shared family calendar, shopping list, and to-do tracker. Chores are just a to-do list — no coins, no rewards, no allowance.
Skylight, Greenlight Family Hub, BusyKid, Homey, and Cozi pricing verified on each product's own site at the time of writing. Feature notes are based on their product pages, help centers, and app-store listings. If anything here is out of date, email us — we'll fix it.
Chore Coin runs on a small computer in your home. Every chore, every coin, every kid's name lives on your hardware, in your house. We never see it because it never leaves.
No accounts on our servers. No analytics, no ads, no "usage" pings. Our company doesn't know your kids exist. Guaranteed by architecture, not by policy.
Download your whole family's history in one click. Save it to a thumb drive, restore it on a new computer, keep it forever. No cloud, no lock-in, no "we're shutting down" email.
Move to a bigger computer? Release your license on the old one, activate on the new one. Your $20 buys the software forever, not a lease on a machine.
Kid to app to parent to reward — in about 90 seconds.
On their own phone or the kitchen tablet. Takes one tap.
"Alex finished 'make your bed'." Approve or reject in one tap.
Every device in the family updates in under a second. Kid sees the new balance immediately.
Extra screen time, allowance, or something from your reward menu. Every transaction shows in the family ledger.
It's a small app that needs a small computer at home to run on. Here's what that looks like in plain language.
$20, one time. You'll get a license key in your email a few seconds later. Save that email — you'll need the key next.
Any computer at your house that stays on. A spare laptop works. A Mac mini works. Or grab a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2W — it's the size of a pack of gum and uses less power than a nightlight.
Pick the launcher for your computer below, download it, paste your license key when it asks, and wait about 30 seconds. When it's done it opens Chore Coin in your browser to finish setup.
Both Mac and Windows will show a one-time security warning for the launcher (it's not signed by Apple/Microsoft — that would add hundreds of dollars per year to your $20 price). The install guide shows you exactly what to click to allow it.
When you buy Chore Coin, you get a plain-English install guide with numbered steps for every part — downloading the launcher, clicking past the security warning, finishing setup in your browser, adding your kids, adding your first chores. Designed for parents who have never touched Terminal or Command Prompt before.
The guide also covers the most common install hiccups and how to fix them yourself in under a minute. If something isn't clear, email daniel@turnersystems.com — we improve the guide every time a real family gets stuck.
No download-and-double-click, just paste-and-go. All three commands do exactly the same thing as the launchers above.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielhemp/chore-coin/main/install.sh | \ CHORECOIN_LICENSE=CHRC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX sh
$env:CHORECOIN_LICENSE = 'CHRC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX' iwr -UseBasicParsing https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielhemp/chore-coin/main/install.ps1 | iex
Detects your OS + CPU, verifies the download's checksum, installs the app, and registers it as a background service so it starts on boot / at logon. Setup wizard opens in your browser to create your admin + first parent.
Buy once, use forever. Get every future update free.
Launching soon — email me to be notified.
smiths.chore-coin.familyRequires an active Chore Coin license.
Yes. Every license comes with a step-by-step visual install guide that walks a total beginner through opening Terminal (on Mac or Linux), pasting one command, and finishing setup in the browser — with screenshots at every step. Most parents get it running in under 15 minutes on the first try. Once installed, everything is in the app on your phone; no terminal ever again. If you don't want to do it yourself, ask a tech-friendly friend for 15 minutes, or consider our paid install-help add-on ($50, done via screen-share — coming at launch).
Anything that stays on and runs Mac, Windows 10/11, or Linux. A spare laptop, a Mac mini, an old iMac someone gave you, a Windows desktop, or a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (a tiny credit-card-sized computer that plugs into a wall outlet). Chore Coin uses less RAM than a browser tab and works on hardware from the last decade.
Yes. Chore Coin runs in Safari or Chrome — no App Store download needed. Open it once, then "Add to Home Screen" and it looks and feels like any other app on the phone. Works the same on Android and iPad.
Yes. If your youngest has their first phone locked down to just a few apps, Chore Coin is one of the apps you can add. Perfect for starting kids with structured phone use.
On iPhone / iPad: install Chore Coin from Safari via Share → Add to Home Screen, then open it from the home-screen icon (not from Safari) and allow notifications when prompted. iOS only pushes notifications for apps you've added to the home screen this way.
On Android: use Google Chrome. Some third-party Android browsers — Brave in particular — install Chore Coin fine but silently drop web push notifications, so "Alex finished a chore" never reaches your phone. If you already installed from Brave, remove it from your home screen, open Chrome, and reinstall from there. Same URL, same account — just a different browser doing the install.
On desktop: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari all support notifications for signed-in parents.
On the computer at your house that you installed it on. Nothing goes to us. Nothing goes to a cloud. If your internet is down, the app still works on your home Wi-Fi.
Two ways. Free: set up a Cloudflare Tunnel (a free service that
gives your home a public web address without opening any router
ports — takes about 10 minutes). Paid: add the $12/year subdomain
add-on and you'll get a nice memorable address like
smiths.chore-coin.family.
Either way, your data still lives at home; only the address
forwards.
Two clicks. On the old computer: Settings → Download family backup. On the new computer: install Chore Coin, and during setup pick "Restore from backup." Kids, chores, coins, full history — all comes across. Then release the license on the old machine and activate it on the new one.
Yes. $20 buys the app forever, on any computer, for any number of kids and chores. Every future update is free — you'll get an in-app notice when a new version is out. The only optional cost is the $12/year subdomain add-on if you want a memorable web address, which you can skip.
Nothing to you. The app keeps running on your home computer with no dependency on our servers. Your license stays valid, your data stays yours, and the source code is public — anyone with the skills can keep it working. This is the whole point of running from home.
$20 once. All the features. Your family's data stays with your family. Get notified the moment we launch.
One email at launch. Nothing else, ever.