Prefer what people like
Everyone rates the chores they mind least, once. After that the schedule hands out mostly well-rated work while keeping the totals level. This is the style the free plan uses, and for most households it is also the right one.
Chore charts and rotas
A chore chart nobody has to keep updating
A chart on the fridge works until the first week somebody is away. OctoFlat keeps the same chart on everybody’s phone and fills it in by itself, which removes the job that was never written on the chart: deciding whose turn it is.
Free on the App Store and on Google Play.
Four ways to decide whose turn it is
All four keep the workload even; they differ in what they optimise on top of that. Most households know which one they want after a fortnight.
Rotate, round robin, or random but fair
Rotate as much as possible means nobody does the same chore twice running. Round robin is a strict turn order for every chore. Random but fair is a surprise pick, weighted so that nobody ends up overloaded. All three are Premium.
Only to the people it applies to
A chore can be limited to the members it is actually about, repeat daily, weekly or monthly, and fall due in the morning or by the end of the day. Change the settings and you choose the day the new plan starts from — whatever is already planned stays put unless you ask for a rebalance.
The chart, as it looks on a Tuesday
One screen per household showing what is due, who it is assigned to and what has already been done. A chore that is ticked off moves into the history, which is where a household looks when the question stops being whose turn it is and becomes whether anybody has done this in a month.
Who ends up using this
A family with children old enough to have a rota
Chores go to the people they apply to, with a clear due time and no parent reading out a list. A finished chore is visible to everybody, which settles the “I already did that” conversation without anybody having to be believed.
A flatshare of four
The bins, the bathroom and the kitchen floor, rotating so nobody gets the worst one twice running. The rota lives outside the group chat, so it survives the week everybody stops reading the group chat.
A couple splitting the invisible work
Most of the work in a home is the work nobody names out loud. Putting it on a schedule turns the distribution into a fact rather than an impression, which is usually what somebody is after when they go looking for a chore chart.
What the free plan covers
One-off tasks are unlimited on both plans. Recurring chores are capped at five on the free plan, which includes the preference-based assignment style; rotation, round robin and random-but-fair are Premium, as is the per-person contribution history. Premium applies to the whole household, so one member subscribing covers everybody.
Compare Free and PremiumQuestions about the rota
What happens to the rota when somebody is away for a week?
Reassign the individual chores, or rebalance the schedule from a date you pick — everything planned before that day stays exactly as it was, and whoever is part-way through a chore keeps the one they are on.
Can we see whether the split is actually even?
There is a contribution view that sets what each person has done against their share, so a gap is something the household can look at rather than something one person suspects. The history and the per-person breakdown are part of Premium.
Where to go next
What else OctoFlat does, what each plan includes, and where to install it.
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