It was a Tuesday night and my partner Joel was standing in the kitchen looking genuinely smug about unloading the dishwasher. Not just pleased. Smug. Because he had more points than me in OurHome and he wanted me to know it.
That was the moment I realized the app had broken something between us.
We'd downloaded OurHome about six weeks earlier, after one of those circular arguments about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. You know the kind. Nobody wins, both people feel vaguely wronged, and you go to bed annoyed. A chore splitting app for couples seemed like a reasonable solution. Assign tasks, track completion, stop having the same fight every two weeks.
OurHome has this gamification system built into it. You earn points for completing tasks, and you can redeem those points for rewards that you set up together. In theory it sounds kind of fun, like turning adulting into a little game. In practice, for us, it quietly introduced a competitive dynamic that had no business being in our home.
Joel is just wired to optimize things. He started front-loading easy tasks early in the week to rack up points fast. I'm more of a do-it-when-it-needs-doing person. So within about two weeks, his point total was consistently higher than mine, and it started to feel less like we were managing a home together and more like I was losing at something.
The rewards system made it stranger. We'd set up rewards like "pick the movie tonight" or "sleep in Saturday." Harmless stuff. But once points were attached to those things, they stopped feeling like small pleasures we shared and started feeling like prizes I hadn't earned. I actually felt guilty one morning for sleeping in, which is a level of household app dysfunction I did not anticipate.
The core problem with OurHome, at least for us, is that it treats chores as individual achievements rather than shared responsibilities. Every task has a point value. Every completed task is a personal win. That framing works fine if you're trying to motivate a ten-year-old to make their bed. It works less well when two adults are trying to feel like equal partners in a home they both live in.
Fairness in a household isn't really about points. It's about both people feeling like the invisible work is seen. The task that nobody logged because it didn't have a point value. The mental load of remembering that we're out of dish soap before we actually run out. The way one person always notices the trash is full a day before the other person would have gotten around to it.
None of that shows up in a gamified system. It gets flattened into a leaderboard, and leaderboards create winners and losers.
We stuck with OurHome longer than we probably should have, partly because setting it up had taken effort and neither of us wanted to admit it wasn't working. But the resentment kept building in small ways. I'd finish something that wasn't on the list and feel invisible. Joel would complete a high-point task and feel like he deserved recognition I wasn't giving him. The app had given us a new thing to argue about without actually solving the original problem.
When we finally talked about it honestly, Joel admitted the points had started to feel hollow to him too. He wasn't actually more invested in the home. He was just better at gaming a system, and that's not the same thing.
What we needed wasn't motivation through rewards. We needed a clearer picture of everything that actually needed doing, a way to divide it that accounted for our different schedules and capacities, and honestly, a way to stop keeping score altogether.
The score-keeping was the thing that had to go. Not because fairness doesn't matter, it absolutely does, but because tracking fairness through a competitive points system turns your partner into an opponent. And I don't want to live with my opponent.
After we dropped OurHome, we spent a couple weeks just using a shared notes document, which was better but still clunky. Tasks fell through the gaps. We'd both think the other person was handling something. The original problem wasn't fully solved, just differently managed.
I've talked to enough people in similar situations to know this isn't just a Joel-and-Mara thing. The chore splitting app space is full of tools that either gamify everything or do nothing but make a list. Neither approach really accounts for how households actually function, which is messily, with uneven weeks and shifting priorities and tasks that don't fit neatly into categories.
What actually helped us was finding something that focused on shared visibility rather than individual performance. Seeing the full picture of what needed to happen, without it being framed as a competition. That shift in framing changed how we talked about household tasks entirely.
If you're in the same place we were, frustrated with OurHome or looking for an ourhome alternative that doesn't accidentally turn your home into a competition, I'd tell you to look at Orbyt. It's what we use now, and it handles the shared-home angle in a way that finally feels like it was designed for two adults who actually like each other.
The app isn't the relationship. But a bad app can do real damage to a good one. That Tuesday night in the kitchen taught me that much.