Family Chore Buddy: A Bank for Kids That Isn't a Bank

My kids are bad with money. That's normal for kids, and it isn't really their fault, because most of their money is money they never see.

We hold whatever they earn or get as gifts. Everyone agrees one of them has $40. Then a $5 thing happens, then some Robux, then some V-Bucks, and nobody writes any of it down. A few weeks later $35 is gone and they're sure they still have $30.

Family Chore Buddy exists so there's never a question about how much they have.

A virtual bank account

The idea started back in July as a conversation about an app that tracked the kids' money and let them request purchases. It wasn't backed by a bank or a card. It was just a virtual account so I could keep track of what they bought and how much they had left.

Parents run the central bank. We record allowance and chores, approve purchases, and fix mistakes. Kids who have a device can see their own balance, ask for a purchase, and set what they're saving for. They can still ask in person, and I record it for them.

There's one spendable balance. If they put money onto a game platform, it comes out of that balance like anything else. I don't need to track what's sitting inside each game. I just need to know what they've spent.

Saving for something

Goals turned out to be the part that matters most. A kid can set money aside for something they want, and it stays separate from their spending money. When they ask how much they have, the answer is $20 to spend and $50 saved toward the goal.

It isn't locked. They can plead their case to pull money out of savings. But when they look at a purchase, the app shows what it does to the goal. If you spend this $20, you'll only have $5 left toward the thing you said you wanted.

It also shows how many weeks of allowance something would take, along with the dollar amount. My kids love finding ways to make extra money, and seeing a price in weeks makes that click.

We added a parent match to reward saving, and kept it separate on purpose. It shows $20 saved and $5 matched, for $25 total. If they pull money out of the goal, they can see exactly what match they're walking away from.

Chores that make sense

Prices are whatever we actually deduct. I'm not working out tax on a quick store run, but if something online is $37 delivered, I'll tell them it's $37 to get the $34 thing.

Chores can have spacing, like three times a week with a day in between. The app flags the day a chore has to get done, because waiting any longer means there's no way to hit the deadline. That's a lot easier than me reminding them.

From idea to live product in a week

The real build started on October 10. The first day took it from a parent ledger to kid sign-in with a PIN, goals and matching, chores, a landing page, and a live site. Over the next week it picked up a hand-over mode for passing a parent's phone to a kid, a native app on the way to the App Store, and sign-up for other families.

I built it with Loomfield, which made it a good test of everything I've been writing about here. The project, decisions, and tasks lived in the Weave from the first hour, and most of the code was written by AI sessions while I made the calls.

Of course it talks to AI

I had to connect it to AI. AI work has taken over most of my side projects this year, and building a family app that couldn't talk to an assistant felt like leaving out the best part.

Family Chore Buddy has its own MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, or any assistant that supports connectors can set up a family, keep it current, and report on it in plain words. It's off until a parent turns it on. It's also the part of the project I've had the most fun with, so I wrote it up separately.

Try it

My family uses it every week, and other families can try it free for 30 days with no card.

If you've ever had the "I still have $30" argument, it might help.