IThe noticing, not the doing
Every household app ever built assumes the work is the thing you do: the shopping, the pickup, the laundry. Those are visible by nature — somebody watches them happen, and they end. The half that does not end is the noticing: holding the fact that the prescription runs out on the 14th, that the form is due before the term starts, that the shoes stopped fitting a month ago and nobody has said so yet.
That half has a name in the research literature — cognitive household labour — and no receipt. The Ledger asks for the noticing and nothing else. What you did today is already visible. What you carried is what goes in the book.
The noticingIIOne line, in the evening
The entry is deliberately small, because a system that asks for a lot at the end of a long day is a system that gets abandoned in a fortnight. One line, in your own words, for the thing you held: booked the dentist for the week after half-term. Mark it quick, medium or heavy if you want the weight recorded; leave it unmarked if you do not.
A reminder at an hour you choose, if you want one, and a Siri phrase for the nights when opening an app is one thing too many. A week of it draws a small chart. A month of it is an argument you no longer have to make from memory.
The entryIIIA tally, and nobody to beat
A receipt and a scoreboard are made of the same numbers and do completely different work. A scoreboard exists to be compared — it needs a second column, an opponent, a verdict. A receipt exists to be shown, once, to whoever needs to see what a thing actually cost.
So there is no second column here. The Ledger has no partner-facing product, no shared view, no ranking, and no weekly summary that arrives in someone else's inbox with your name on it. It counts your days and your entries, plainly, and that count is for you. The one thing you can do with it is hand it over yourself — export the record and show it, on your own decision, on a day you choose.
The receiptIVWritten on your own phone
Your entries stay on the device. They are held there, and they move between your own devices through your own private iCloud, which is Apple's and not ours — we run no database holding what you wrote about your household, which means we cannot read it, cannot restore it, and cannot hand it to anyone who asks for it.
Everything is exportable to CSV whenever you want it in your own hands, and everything is deletable in one action. Nothing about your household is used to train anything, sold, or brokered — a ledger of what you quietly carry is close to the last thing that should be someone else's asset.
The recordVThe word attached to the price
The price, plainly. $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year — the year works out to over five months free. Every subscription starts with a 7-day free trial, renews automatically until you cancel, and cancelling takes one visit to your Apple ID settings.
Your entries stay on the device. Not as a setting that ships switched on and can be quietly switched off later, but as the shape of the thing: there is no server holding your household's record, so there is nothing for us to change our minds about.
No ads, no partner-facing product, no scoreboard. We will not build the version of this that lets one person watch another's number. We will not add an account requirement later to hold your own tally behind it. And we will not turn the noticing into a game, because the whole reason it is worth counting is that it is not one.
The house's word The Ledger does not divide the work, and it will not have the conversation for you. It writes down the half of it that has never left a mark, so that when the conversation happens it starts from a figure rather than from two people's memories of how tired they were.