A Chore App With No Ads

Search the App Store for a free chore app for kids and the front page fills 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.

Tracking is worse, just quieter

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 iOS version, which first name was just typed in.

None of that is necessary to track chores. It exists because the rest of the app economy made it the default. Removing it is mostly a matter of choosing to.

What it costs to make a chore app with no ads

Roughly the price of one coffee a year. Choreo is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and that pays for everything: no ads to anyone, no third-party tracking SDKs, no analytics company getting a slice of your family's data on the side. Your data is encrypted with a key only your family holds, so we genuinely can't read it from where we sit.

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 with no ads and no tracking 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 Choreo. The privacy page lays out exactly what the app does and doesn't see, and the pricing page covers what it costs.