What chore and allowance apps cost in 2026, checked on 20 September

The numbers

Every price, checked the same day

Prices are in US dollars unless a row says otherwise. The App Store shows every price in the visitor's own currency, so the figure on your own device will differ from the figure here. Two rows come from UK price pages and are published in pounds, so they carry the pound figure with its currency code rather than a conversion I would have had to invent.

Not published means I found no first-party figure for that cell on the day of the check, either because the company does not sell that plan or because it does not say what it costs. Four apps that belong in this category are missing from the table for the same reason. Cozi, FamilyWall, Chores and Allowance Bot and Homey did not have a price I could trace to the company that charges it on 20 September 2026: FamilyWall's own pricing pages returned a 404, the other three publish no price on their own site. Homey does publish a free tier of up to three accounts, which is the only first-party number of the four. A figure I cannot trace to the company charging it is not a figure I will put in a price table, even when it is circulating widely.

The direction

Why is everyone moving to one price per family?

S'moresUp has the clearest ladder, and it wrote the whole thing down itself. Its own pricing FAQ says the app launched at $4.99 a month, sells today at $7.99 a month and $79.99 a year, and moves to $9.99 a month and $99.99 a year from 5 July 2026. That last figure is a penny over double what the app launched at. Nobody had to estimate any of it, because the company publishes the old price, the current price and the date the next one starts.

GoHenry shows the same pressure from a different angle. In the United Kingdom it still sells a seat per child, GBP 3.99 to GBP 5.99, and it also sells a Max tier at GBP 9.99 covering a family of up to four children. Four children at the cheapest per-child rate come to GBP 15.96 against GBP 9.99 for the family tier, which is the company telling you plainly which of its own products it would rather sell. In the United States GoHenry folded into Acorns Early, where the entry plan is $8 a month for up to four children and the Gold bundle is $12, a move to a higher price than GoHenry charged.

Read down the Scope column and the pattern is not subtle. Five of the eight rows price one household whatever its size. Greenlight caps a plan at five children, Tody prices Premium+ by household size, and GoHenry in the UK is the only one in this set still selling by the child, next to the family tier it would clearly prefer you bought. Per family is winning, and a second or third child is stopping being a line item.

The Lifetime column is the emptiest in the table. Seven of the eight rows have nothing in it. Reward Study sells one at $99.99 once, which carries every future update and the Reward Ideas add-on with it. Set against the $39.99 yearly plan, $99.99 is almost exactly two and a half years, so it is a worse deal for a family trying this for a season and a better one for a family with most of a childhood still ahead. I should say the obvious tradeoff too: a subscription pays for the work that keeps arriving, and a lifetime purchase is a bet by both of us that the work keeps arriving anyway. I sell both and let you decide which bet suits you. The arithmetic on each one, year by year, is in the post on what a children's allowance app costs.

What you keep

What happens to your family's record if you stop paying?

Almost every row in this table is a subscription, which makes this the question worth asking before the monthly figure is. Here is the answer for Reward Study, in the words the app itself uses on the screen where you cancel. "Subscriptions are managed by Apple. Nothing is deleted when you cancel. At the end of the period your tasks and rewards pause: they stay on screen and stay readable, but nobody can add or complete one. Your credits, your history and everything you created stay, and you can still award and deduct credits by hand."

That is why the free tier column reads no for us rather than yes. A household that has never subscribed, or whose subscription has lapsed, is not capped at a number of children or tasks, it is frozen: everything already there stays visible and readable, and nothing new joins it. Two things are never gated, because neither creates anything. You can still edit a child's name, avatar, colour and birth date, and a child can still spend credits they already earned.

Every figure on this page was checked on 20 September 2026 and every one of them will move. S'moresUp has already published the date its own numbers change. If you are reading this some months later, treat the table as a photograph of the category on one day rather than a current price list, and check the row you care about before you pay for anything. Our own plans, with what each one includes and what happens at the end of each one, are on the pricing page.