What a children's allowance app costs, added up

The arithmetic

Do the multiplication before you subscribe

Whatever a plan costs, multiply it by the time your child is at home. A child who starts at six and stops needing this at fourteen is eight years, and with many apps two children means two subscriptions. The figure that matters is the one at the end of that sum, not the one on the button.

That is not an argument against paying for software. It is an argument for doing the multiplication first, which takes a minute and is easy to skip.

So here is every price this app has, multiplied out. Reward Study Pro is $39.99 a year, $7.99 a month, or $2.99 a week. Over a single year those come to $39.99, $95.88 and $155.48. Eight years of the yearly plan is about $320. The monthly and weekly plans cost more over a year because they are meant for a few months or a few weeks, and I would rather you read that here than found it on a statement.

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 neither the monthly nor the weekly plan has a trial. All three renew until you cancel them in your App Store subscription settings, and you keep Pro to the end of the period you paid for. The monthly plan is in Settings, under Store, rather than on the screen a new family sees.

• As many children as you need.
• Tasks your children can mark done, and rewards they can spend on.
• Two households, for two homes.
• Maths story word problems in a theme your child picks.
• The full ledger exported as a CSV file, one row per entry.
• Shared with your Family Sharing group, so nobody subscribes twice.

Two households come with Pro, so a parent who keeps both homes' ledgers on their own Apple Account switches between them from the Dashboard, each with its own children, tasks, rewards and ledger. Two separated parents who each run their own home need nothing extra either: each owns one household, and a child's device joins both by invitation.

One add on is bought once and never renews. Reward Ideas, $1.99, adds fifty ready-made reward ideas with suggested prices. If you would rather pay once for everything, lifetime Pro is $99.99, with Reward Ideas included.

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.