Reviewed by the Penny Time editorial team

Part of our Allowance hub.

Free vs Subscription Kids' Money Apps: What a Monthly Fee Actually Buys You in 2026

Every well-known kids' money app charges a monthly subscription. Greenlight, Acorns Early (formerly GoHenry), BusyKid, FamZoo, and Modak all bill somewhere between $3.99 and $14.98 a month. That is $48 to $180 a year to track an allowance most families hand over in cash.

Our bias, stated up front: Penny Time is free. We do not issue a debit card and we do not take a cut of your child's spending, so we have an obvious interest in you deciding you do not need a paid app. Read the price table, then read the section on who genuinely should pay. Some families should.

What the paid apps charge in 2026

Prices below are the published family-plan rates as of early 2026. Every one of these is billed monthly or annually per family, not per child, unless noted.

Check each provider's own pricing page before you sign up. These companies reprice, and GoHenry's absorption into Acorns Early in 2025 moved a lot of families onto a different plan structure than the one they originally bought.

What the fee actually pays for

The subscription is not paying for the chore list. Chore tracking, allowance math, and savings goals are cheap software problems that have been solved a hundred times over. Three real costs sit behind the fee.

1. Issuing a physical debit card

This is the big one. A card for a 9-year-old requires a bank partner, a card issuer, KYC checks on the parent, fraud monitoring, plastic, and postage. Kids' cards also generate almost no interchange revenue because the average transaction is a $4 snack. Under the Durbin amendment's exemption for small issuers the app keeps roughly 1 to 1.5 percent of spend, which on a kid spending $30 a month is about 40 cents. The subscription covers the gap.

2. Custodial investing

Greenlight Max and Acorns Early both let a parent buy fractional shares in a custodial account. That requires a registered broker-dealer relationship, tax reporting, and compliance staff. It is a genuine service and it is genuinely expensive to run.

3. Support and a company that stays alive

When money is involved, families expect a human on the phone. Free products rarely staff a call centre.

Notice what is not on this list: the tracking itself. If you are paying $9.98 a month and your child never uses the card, you are paying for infrastructure you are not touching.

Who genuinely does not need to pay

Skip the subscription if any of these describe you.

• Your child is under 8. Kids this age learn money through physical coins and visible jars. A card abstracts away the exact thing you are trying to teach. Start with a chore chart and cash.
• You pay allowance in cash. A card app with no card loaded is a $72-a-year spreadsheet.
• Your teen already has a bank account. Chase First Banking, Capital One MONEY, and Alliant all offer teen accounts with debit cards at no monthly fee. You get the card without the app subscription.
• You want the teaching, not the plumbing. The conversations do the work. Sitting down to split a $20 birthday cheque into save, spend, and give is the lesson. Our birthday money calculator runs that split in about a minute.
• You are testing whether allowance works at all. Do not commit $180 a year before you know your kid will engage. Run three months free first.

Who should pay

Paid apps earn their fee in three situations. First, if your child spends online or at shops without you, a controlled card with per-merchant limits is worth real money. Second, if you have three or more kids and are constantly reimbursing each other, automated transfers save arguments. Third, if you want custodial investing and do not want to open a brokerage account yourself, Greenlight Max or Acorns Early does it in about ten minutes.

One more case: divorced or separated parents splitting allowance. FamZoo's multi-funder structure handles this better than anything free.

The middle path most families end up on

You do not have to pick one. A common setup that costs nothing: a fee-free teen bank account for the card, and a free app for the allowance logic, goals, and chores. You get the spending controls from the bank and the teaching layer from the app, without a subscription in between.

If you want to run the numbers before deciding, start with what you would actually pay out. Our allowance calculator sets an age-appropriate weekly amount, and the kids' budget planner splits it across save, spend, and give. If your child is at the stage of asking for everything in the shop, the wants vs needs sorter is a better $0 spend than any subscription.

The honest summary: a monthly fee buys a debit card and the regulated machinery behind it. If your child needs a card, pay for it and pick the app whose card rules fit your family. If your child does not, you are subscribing to a chore chart.

Raise kids who understand how money works

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Put this into practice this week

Penny Time turns allowance into a real balance your child tracks on their own device, with your approval on every cash-out. Free for the whole family.