Family Plus
Stars that actually buy something
Chores, the household to-do list and sticker charts all pay into one jar. Rewards can be a treat, real money, or something only an app can hand over — like choosing Friday's dinner and watching it land on the meal plan.
Three ways a job can pay
Most chore apps ship one currency and make every family bend to it. A four-year-old cannot hold the idea that a token becomes a thing later; a fifteen-year-old finds stars insulting. Same chart, three answers.
Stars
They add up in a jar and buy something from a list you set. Best from about seven.
Money
Cents per chore, or a flat weekly allowance on a rule you choose. A ledger, never a payment.
The reward itself
Clean the garage, get movie night. No saving, no arithmetic — the only version a pre-reader understands.
“Pick Friday dinner” is not a coupon
Redeem it and the choice goes onto the family meal plan. The ingredients join the shopping list. On Friday the kitchen board says whose night it is. A wall calendar cannot do this — it has no meal plan to write into.
Where this differs
Stars and a reward list
- Typical app
- Yes
- Homii
- Yes
Your to-do list can pay too
- Typical app
- No — chore chart only
- Homii
- Chores, tasks and charts, one jar
A reward that changes the meal plan
- Typical app
- No meal plan to write into
- Homii
- Pick a dinner, it lands on the plan
Different price on the jobs nobody wants
- Typical app
- One rate
- Homii
- Per-job bounties, excluded from the weekly rule
One job, once a week, across all the kids
- Typical app
- Make a second chore and remember
- Homii
- Built in
Runs on a screen you already own
- Typical app
- $180–400 hardware
- Homii
- Any tablet, phone or laptop
Competitor capabilities checked August 2026 and given in general terms; feature sets move. Hardware prices are typical retail bands.
Your to-do list can pay your kids
Teenagers do not do 'chores'. They run the errand you asked for, which in Homii is a task on the household to-do list. Every other family app rewards a chore chart and nothing else, so the one person most likely to quit is also the one who can never earn. Here, both engines pay into the same jar.
- Chores, tasks and behaviour charts credit one ledger
- The engines stay separate — this is not one giant merged list
- Task earning is off until you switch it on, so nothing changes by surprise
- A daily cap, so nobody can find a repeatable job and mint stars
The whole family saves for one thing — and the kids choose it
A shared goal a parent picks alone is a goal handed down, and a nine-year-old has no reason to care about a number that is not theirs. So the family jar is decided by the family: everyone throws in an idea, a parent picks which go to a vote, everyone gets one vote, and the parent settles it. Skylight and Nori chart chores per child; neither has a household balance to vote about.
- Everyone earns into one jar — it is a share on top, never taken from a child
- Kids suggest what it buys, and every one of them gets a vote
- A parent has the final say, and only a parent can spend it
- Vote counts are shown; who voted for what is never shown to anyone
- The little ones vote by tapping a picture, with no scores to lose
A reward that changes what's for dinner
Most reward lists print a coupon. Ours can reach into the app. Redeem 'pick Friday dinner', choose the meal, and it lands on the family meal plan in the slot everyone already reads. A wall calendar cannot do this, because it has no meal plan to write into.
- Pick a dinner — the child chooses it and it lands on the family plan
- Cook with someone — it creates a real cooking plan for the two of you
- The pick is recorded against the child, and the slot is protected from an auto-plan reshuffle
- Or keep it simple: ice cream, screen time, a late bedtime
An allowance rule nobody argues about
A weekly allowance only works while the rule is winnable. Homii counts the week for you and shows the receipt — what counted, what did not, and why — so a missed week is a conversation about the work rather than about the app.
- Pay per chore, or a flat weekly amount on a condition you choose
- A sick day forgiven by a streak, or a day you excused, never counts as a miss
- Up for Grabs bounties stay out of the rule — optional work is never a miss
- If a rule almost never pays out, Homii says so instead of letting it sour
A week of clear days can pay extra — and one sick day doesn't undo it
Streaks in most apps count showing up: do one small thing a day and the number goes up forever. Homii counts finishing. A day only counts once everything assigned to that child is done, so a run of clear days means what a parent thinks it means — and you can put a real bonus on reaching one. Miss a day and the week's forgiven day bridges it, once, for free.
- Set your own rungs: a week, a month, a hundred days
- Each one pays stars, money, or a reward outright
- A day with nothing assigned neither breaks the run nor pads it
- No streak freezes to buy, no leaderboard, and nothing is sent when a streak ends
Built to scale down as well as up
A star economy asks a child to hold an abstraction, and that lands differently at four, at nine and at fifteen. The same jar renders three ways, and the simplest option has no arithmetic in it at all.
- Pre-readers: a jar that fills, and a picture of the next thing. No numbers
- Kids: the jar, the count, and one tap to ask
- Teens: a ledger and an amount. No jar, no streak flame, no cartoon
- Any age: a chore can carry a reward of its own, with no stars in between
How it works
- 1
Step 1
Turn on earning
Pick which engines pay — chores on their own, or chores and the to-do list together — and set a daily cap. Adults stay out of it unless you add them.
- 2
Step 2
Add two or three rewards
Not a store. Homii tells you roughly how many days each one is away at your child's current rate, because a goal further out than about ten days is the one families give up on.
- 3
Step 3
They earn, ask, and you say yes
Stars accrue as work gets done. A child asks to spend them and you approve in a tap. For a dinner pick or a cooking night, they then choose the meal or the evening and Homii writes it onto the plan.
What's included
- One jar, three engines — chores, the family to-do list and behaviour charts all pay in
- A weekly allowance with a rule you set: everything, any fifteen, or these specific jobs
- Bounties: put your own price on the jobs nobody volunteers for
- Sick days and days you excuse never count against a weekly allowance
- Rewards that write into Homii — pick a dinner, or earn a cooking night with a parent
- A shared family jar, so one child's effort stops being another child's loss
- A chore can hand over a reward outright — no stars, no counting, just a parent's yes
- An allowance ledger of what you owe. Homii links no bank and moves no money
- In their own session a child sees their jar and the family jar, and nobody else's
Chores, routines and the kitchen board are free on every plan. Seeing the work is free; turning it into an allowance is what you pay for.
Frequently asked questions
Does Homii handle real money?
No. The allowance ledger is a note of what you owe — earned, paid, and what is left. Homii moves no money, links no bank account and stores no card. You settle up however your family already does.
Can my to-do list really pay the kids?
Yes, and it is off by default. Turn on task earning and any task can carry a star value, so an older child who never touches the chore chart still earns for the errands they actually run.
Can my kids vote on how the family reward is spent?
Yes. A parent opens a round and everyone adds ideas; the parent picks two to four to put to a vote, and every child gets one vote they can change until it closes. The parent confirms the winner, which becomes what the jar is saving for. Ties are not broken by the app — a parent picks, because that is not a decision software should make in a family.
Can a chore reward be shared between siblings?
Yes. A reward can be funded by the family jar rather than by one child's stars, so a trip or a day out is paid for by everyone's effort instead of draining whoever happened to save the most. A jar reward is checked against the jar's balance, never a child's, and only a parent can approve it.
What stops a child from farming stars?
A daily cap every household can set, and per-job limits. A job can be claimable once per person, or once across the whole household per week — so 'clean your room' is per kid and 'clean the yard' is one kid, once.
Is this fair when a child is sick?
A weekly allowance never counts a day you excused, or a day forgiven by the streak's grace day. Up for Grabs bounties stay out of the rule too, so declining optional work is never a miss. The receipt shows exactly what was and was not counted.
What counts as a day toward a streak?
A day where everything assigned to that child got done. A chore you excused, an optional Up for Grabs job nobody took, and a chore you paused mid-day are all left out rather than counted against them — the same rules the weekly allowance uses, so there is only one idea of what was owed. A day with nothing assigned at all is neutral: it neither extends a run nor breaks it, which is what lets a weekday-only chart hold a streak over the weekend.
Do the kids see each other's stars?
In a child's own session, no. They see their jar and the shared family jar, and a sibling's balance, earning rate and history are never loaded at all. The kitchen board is the deliberate exception: add the rewards tile and it shows every person's stars, because a screen in the kitchen is a shared screen. Nothing is ranked either way — people are listed in the order you added them, never sorted by who is winning.
Is rewards included for free?
Chores, routines, Up for Grabs and the kitchen board are free on every plan. Stars, rewards, bounties and the allowance ledger are part of Family Plus. Kid Mode — a locked session where a child sees only their own chores and jar — is Family Plus AI. Seeing the work is free; turning it into an allowance is what you pay for.
Related pages
See Family Plus
Stars, streaks, the reward catalog and the allowance ledger are part of Family Plus. Chores themselves stay free.