A Chore App With No Ads

Search for a free chore app for kids and the results fill up fast. Most of those apps work fine. Some of them work very well. But almost none of them are actually free.

The trade is the one you already know from the rest of the internet. You don't pay with money. You pay with attention, with data, or with both. The app slots an ad between your kid's chore list and the reward screen. Or it ships an analytics SDK that quietly logs your child's first name and the chores you set them. Or, more often, both.

Ads in a kid's chore app are louder than they sound

An ad on a chore app isn't just an ad. It's an ad on the screen your child looks at the most, in the moment they finish something they're proud of. It buys the attention you were hoping was about the chore.

It also teaches a quiet lesson. The child learns that finishing a chore means watching a thing trying to sell them something. That's not the association anyone signed up for when they downloaded a chore app.

The line we drew: no trackers on your family's data

Ads at least announce themselves. Tracking doesn't. A chore app that loads a third-party analytics or ad SDK is usually sending events out the second the app opens: which device, which browser, which first name was just typed in.

None of that is necessary to track chores. So here's the line we drew. We use a little ordinary analytics on our public website, the marketing pages, so we can see which pages actually help a parent decide. But the moment you sign in, no third-party tracker runs at all. Your kids' names, their chores, the photo of a clean room, none of it ever goes to an analytics company. It lives in our own database and stays there.

What it costs to make a chore app with no ads

Roughly the price of one coffee a year. Chorzle is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and that pays for everything: no ads to anyone, and no analytics company getting a slice of your family's data. We use a little ordinary analytics on the marketing pages, but none of it follows you into the app. Your family's data lives in our own secure database, and we never sell it or share it for advertising.

That math only works because the whole thing was built by a mom and dad who already wanted this for their own family. There's no growth team to feed, no investor deck waiting for a tracking story. The income covers the work and keeps us motivated to keep doing it. It doesn't have to do anything more than that.

Trust is something a chore app can be careful with

A kid's chore list has small data on it: a few first names, a handful of points, maybe the occasional photo of a clean room. None of it is dangerous in isolation. All of it adds up to a picture you probably wouldn't choose to hand to a stranger.

Picking a chore app that shows no ads and keeps trackers off your family's data isn't paranoia. It's keeping a small picture of your family in a small circle, the way most other parts of family life already are.

If that matters to you, take a look at Chorzle. The privacy page lays out exactly what the app does and doesn't see, and the pricing page covers what it costs.