OurHome alternatives: chores, points and pocket money after it closed

OurHome was, for a while, the app people recommended when someone asked how to get children to do chores without nagging. It ran a points system, children could earn rewards, and it had roughly 720k Android installs behind it.

It stopped being updated in 2020 and was removed from the Google Play Store in September 2023. If you still have it installed on an old phone, that is the last copy you are getting.

What people actually used it for

Worth being precise, because it changes what you should replace it with. OurHome was three things stitched together:

1. A chore board for children, with points for completing jobs.
2. A rewards system, where points converted into something the child wanted.
3. A shared family calendar and shopping list, which was the least distinctive part.

Most general family-organiser apps will cover the third. Far fewer do the first two properly, and that is usually why an OurHome refugee ends up disappointed with whatever they tried next.

What to look for in a replacement

• Can children use it without an email address? This is the practical blocker. Many apps require every family member to have a full account and an email address, which is a non-starter for a seven-year-old and a data question you may not want to answer. A picture-and-PIN sign-in is a different thing from an account.
• Do chores connect to money, or only to points? Points are fine for younger children. Older ones notice fairly quickly that points are not money.
• Is the chore split fair, or just assigned? Points reward completion. They do not stop one child (or one adult) being handed the harder half.
• Does it survive the parent losing interest? Routines that repeat by themselves and automatic crediting keep running. Manually awarding points every evening does not, for very long.

How Equal House covers it

Kid Zone is a simple board with stars, “Today’s tasks” and an “I did it!” button. A child is never asked for an email address — they sign in by tapping their family’s picture code, choosing their avatar and entering a PIN, and only on a device the family has approved. Grown-ups control what appears and approve completed chores before they count.

Pocket money credits automatically when a grown-up confirms a chore is done. You set exactly what each chore pays, separately from how hard the app considers it — so a job can be worth a lot of pocket money and little effort, or the other way round, which is closer to how families actually work.

Money jars split pocket money into Spend, Save, Give and Invest. This is the bit that turns a chore chart into something that teaches budgeting rather than just compliance.

Routines turn a morning or bedtime list into one repeating item rather than six nags.

And underneath all of it, the thing OurHome never had: a Fairness Engine that weights chores by effort and shares them out — so the split between the adults gets the same treatment as the split between the children. A household where the children have a beautiful chore chart and one parent still does everything else has not really solved the problem.

Price

Equal House is free with a rolling three-day planning horizon. Pro is £2.99 a month or £29.90 a year for the whole household — not per child, not per adult.

Kid Zone, pocket money and money jars are in the free tier. The three-day horizon is the limit you will run into, not a feature paywall on the children’s side.

Being fair about the alternatives

Equal House is not the only option and we would rather you chose deliberately:

• General family calendars (Cozi, FamilyWall and similar) will replace OurHome’s calendar and list perfectly well, but most treat chores as a secondary feature and few have real pocket money.
• Dedicated pocket-money apps with a debit card attached do the money part much more thoroughly than any organiser app, including us — but they are not chore-splitting tools and they cost more.
• A paper chart on the fridge genuinely works for some families and costs nothing. If OurHome’s appeal was the ritual rather than the software, do not let anyone sell you an app.

If what you want is the chore loop and the household split and the money, in one place, that combination is rarer than it sounds — and it is what Equal House is built around.