What a children's allowance app costs, added up

The arithmetic

Do the multiplication before you subscribe

Whatever the monthly figure is, multiply it by the number of months your child is at home. A child who starts at six and stops needing this at fourteen is eight years, which is 96 payments. Two children rarely means one subscription.

That is not an argument against paying for software. It is an argument for knowing the total before you agree to it, which a monthly price is quite good at hiding.

So here is my own sum, in the open. Reward Study Pro is $39.99 a year, or $2.99 a week. Eight years of the yearly plan is about $320, and I would rather you did that multiplication here than found it on a statement. The weekly plan comes to about $155 a year if you keep it that long, so it is for a few weeks, not for years.

Credits

A credit is not pocket money

Credits are a unit you define. You decide what a task is worth and what a reward costs, so the whole scale is yours: a household where a reward is an hour of screen time and one where it is a trip to the pool both work, without either pretending to be a currency.

No money moves through the app. Nothing connects to a bank, there is no card, and no payment leaves the family. It is a ledger, not a wallet.

If you do want a child to see what a credit is worth in real money, Settings has a credit value you can set. It is off by default, because whether a nine year old should be looking at a cash figure is a parenting decision and not a sensible default.

The plans

What Reward Study Pro covers

A new family starts with a 14-day free trial of the yearly plan. The trial turns into the paid year unless you cancel it before it ends, and the weekly plan has no trial at all. Both plans renew until you cancel them in your App Store subscription settings, and you keep Pro to the end of the period you paid for.

• Unlimited children, tasks and rewards.
• Maths word problems written on the device by Apple Intelligence.
• The full ledger exported as a CSV file, one row per entry.
• Shared with your Family Sharing group, so nobody subscribes twice.

Two add ons are bought once and never renew. Second Household, $4.99, lets your Apple Account own a second household of its own, with its own children, tasks, rewards and ledger, switched from the Dashboard. It is for one parent who keeps both homes' ledgers on their own Apple Account. Two separated parents who each run their own home need no add on at all: each owns one household, and a child's device joins both by invitation. Reward Ideas, $1.99, adds fifty ready-made reward ideas with suggested prices.

The Apple TV scoreboard is not on that list because every household has it, Pro or not. And your family's data still lives in your own iCloud, with no account and no server of mine holding it. The subscription changes the price, not that.