Four Chore Apps, Two Roommates, One Dishwasher: A Month of Settling Who Actually Did It Last Time

The dishwasher in our apartment has a door that doesn't latch unless you lift it slightly while pushing. This is relevant because for eleven months, the question of who last ran it has been the single most reliable source of tension in a household that otherwise gets along fine. Nobody's mad. Everybody's keeping score.

So we tried to outsource the scorekeeping. Four chore apps, one week each, three roommates — me, Dev, and Priya — in a two-bedroom in Chicago with one bathroom, a cat, and a laundry room in the basement that gets no signal. Ground rules: whoever's week it was installed the app and set it up, everyone else had to actually use it, and at the end of the week we rated it on fairness, notification noise, and whether it survived the basement.

Week One: OurHome, or the Points Economy Begins

OurHome is free, built around shared task lists and a points system, and it has the cheerful visual language of a classroom reward chart. Setup took twenty minutes because we had to agree on point values, which is a conversation we had successfully avoided for a year.

Dev assigned dish duty 15 points and taking out trash 5. Priya immediately asked why vacuuming was worth less than dishes. I said this was exactly the kind of thing the app was supposed to solve, and everyone looked at me like I'd said something naive.

By Thursday, the free market had developed a flaw: point inflation. Someone — I won't say who, but it was Dev — logged "wiped counters" four times in one evening. The app accepted it. There's no verification layer, so points measure enthusiasm for tapping, not effort. We still had the argument, we just had it about point values instead of dishes.

Rating: fair-ish, quiet enough, worked offline fine. Died a slow death from gaming.

Week Two: Sweepy, Which Has Opinions About Your Bathroom

Sweepy organizes by room rather than by task, which initially felt smarter — you're not doing "dishes," you're doing "kitchen." It also assigns a "messiness level" to each room and adjusts frequency accordingly. Priya liked this instantly. Dev found it judgmental.

"It says the bathroom is at 68% clean," Dev reported from the hallway. "What does that mean. It's a number. Who decided."

The nagging is where Sweepy lost votes. It's the kind of app that pings you with a little room icon and a gentle reminder and then another one ninety minutes later. Week two was also the week Priya's work schedule went sideways, and her phone started stacking up red badges she couldn't clear without physically scrubbing something. That's a bad feeling to build into a shared living situation. Guilt as a service.

Rating: best mental model, worst notification discipline. Premium features are behind a subscription we didn't pay for, so the multi-person view was limited.

Week Three: Tody, or Micro-Tasks Gone Feral

Tody tracks dirtiness levels per task and breaks everything into small increments — "wipe stovetop" shows up way before "deep clean kitchen." The philosophy is that small frequent nudges beat a Saturday cleaning marathon, and in theory I agree.

In practice, Tody turned our apartment into a task feed. The app is thorough enough that we had something like forty active items, and every single one had a color that meant something. By Wednesday we were all slightly stressed by a bar chart about our own home. Also, we run a two-person-plus-one schedule where nobody has a consistent weekday, so the built-in weekly rhythm never matched anyone's actual life.

The basement problem surfaced properly here. Tody wants to sync when you check something off. Down in the laundry room with no signal, Dev moved a load over, tapped the app, and got a spinner. The checkmark vanished. He came back upstairs and did it again out of spite.

Rating: great for one person in a stable routine, rough for three people with irregular schedules. Highest notification volume of the four.

Week Four: Nipto, the One That Started an Actual Conversation

Nipto is gamified — points, streaks, a head-to-head view — and it's the only one that showed us, plainly, that Priya had been doing roughly 44% of the tracked work while Dev and I split the rest. She'd been saying this for months. The app just put it in a chart.

That chart was not a fun thing to look at. But it was useful. We rebalanced, cut the task list from forty items to sixteen, and stopped assigning points to things like "wiped counters." Nipto's notifications are blunt ("your turn") but there are far fewer of them, and you can turn the whole thing down to a Sunday digest, which we did by day three.

Offline behavior is the weak spot — it needs a connection to log anything, same as Tody, so the basement still ate a checkmark. But it's the only app that changed our behavior rather than describing it.

Rating: most friction during setup, least friction after. Fairness was its whole point and it delivered.

What We Actually Kept

Four weeks in, we deleted three apps. Sweepy and Tody both punished us with reminders we didn't ask for, and OurHome's point economy turned into a second argument layered on the first one. Nipto survived, with notifications pushed to a single Sunday summary and the task list trimmed to what we'd realistically do.

One caveat worth stating plainly: an app can't fix a household where people don't want to be fair. What Nipto did was make the imbalance visible enough that nobody could argue with it, and that's a different and much smaller job than "ending the argument." Priya's summary, which I'm quoting verbatim because it's the best review any of these got: "It didn't make us cleaner. It made us stop pretending."

We still have the group chat. We just use it for the cat now.