The pocket money tracker for the Bank of Mum and Dad
Stop keeping your kids’ pocket money balances in your head. CapKin tracks pocket money, spending and savings goals for the whole family — with no prepaid card and no monthly fee. The money stays where it already is; CapKin keeps the score.
- CapKin keeps a running pocket money balance for each of your kids — paid, spent, saved, and owed.
- No prepaid card and no monthly fee. The money stays wherever it already lives; CapKin keeps the score.
- Kids log their own spending and every entry waits for your approval.
- Savings goals with a parent-controlled lock turn “I’m saving up” into something that actually happens.
- Free during beta. Works on any phone, in the browser.
Every family already runs a pocket money system
It goes like this. You agree £3 a week. You rarely have £3 in coins on a Saturday, so it rolls over. Granny adds a tenner at half-term. Your daughter lends her brother two pounds, which becomes a diplomatic incident. And somewhere around week six, the family ledger — which is your memory — gives out.
Here’s the thing every parent knows and nobody says: the kids’ version of the ledger never gives out. Your eight-year-old can recite what you owe them going back to Easter, with interest they’ve invented. You’re not running a pocket money system. You’re running a bank with no records and a very motivated auditor.
That’s the actual job of a pocket money tracker — not moving money around, just settling, once and for all, the question of who has what.
CapKin keeps the books
Set each child’s pocket money once — £3 every Saturday, say — and CapKin credits it automatically, week after week. Nothing moves; there’s no card to load and no wallet CapKin holds. The balance is a number the whole family can see, which turns out to be the feature: no more “you never gave me last week’s.”
Granny’s birthday tenner? Log it when it happens, and it’s part of the record. The two pounds borrowed between siblings? Each child has their own balance, so it’s visible whose money went where — and the diplomatic incident resolves itself with a glance instead of a tribunal.
When your kid spends — crisps at the shop, a comic, a top-up for a game — they log it themselves, typed or spoken if you’ve switched voice on for them. Every entry sits as pending until you approve it. Most approvals take two seconds from the sofa. The odd surprising one is exactly the conversation you’d want to have anyway.
Saving up, with the leak fixed
Pocket money savings have one classic failure: the saved money is theoretical right up until it isn’t. The bike fund gets raided for a football card binge, and nobody quite remembers agreeing to that.
In CapKin, a child picks a goal — a £25 game, a £60 scooter — and moves pocket money into it whenever they like. Money in a goal can be locked, and locked money only comes out through a request you approve or decline. When they’re about to spend on something small, CapKin gently asks first: spend it, or put it toward the scooter? Their choice, one tap, no lecture built in.
Kids who reach a goal they funded themselves remember it. That’s the whole point of pocket money, and it’s the part a prepaid card can’t do for you.
Why there’s no card
The UK’s pocket money apps — Rooster Money, GoHenry, HyperJar Kids — all come with a card, and for older kids who shop on their own, a card is fair enough. But a card changes the question from “is my child learning?” to “is my child’s card topped up?”, and for younger kids it swaps coins and jars — which they understand — for tap-and-forget, which they don’t. It usually adds a subscription, too.
CapKin doesn’t put payment power in a seven-year-old’s pocket. It puts the family’s numbers where everyone can see them. If you later want a card as well, run both — the card spends, CapKin keeps the books.
How it compares
| App | Price | Card | Tracks physical cash? | What it really is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CapKin | Free during beta | No | Yes — coins, notes, “money mum’s holding” | Family budget with per-child pocket money ledgers |
| Rooster Money | Card £1.99/mo (free for NatWest customers) | Prepaid card | Partly | Kids’ card with pocket money features |
| GoHenry | From £3.99/mo | Prepaid card | No | Kids’ card with money missions |
| HyperJar Kids | Free | Prepaid card | No | Prepaid card with digital savings jars |
Fair is fair: if your child needs to pay for the school canteen or shop online themselves, those cards do a job CapKin doesn’t — and if you bank with NatWest, Rooster’s card costs nothing. If pocket money in your house means chores with per-task rates, a chore app tracks that loop better; CapKin doesn’t do chore charts.
But if your real problem is the ledger — who’s been paid, who’s owed, where it went, what’s being saved — the card apps track only what passes through their card. CapKin tracks the money your family actually uses: coins, notes, birthday tenners and all.
CapKin grows with your kids, too: the same setup a younger child starts with is the budget a teenager later joins as a full member — see our budget app for teens. And if you think in terms of allowance rather than pocket money, the same approach is on our allowance app without a debit card page.
Frequently asked questions
- We’ve got three kids. Does that work?
- Yes — each child has their own balance, their own goals, and their own history, inside the one family budget. Sibling maths (“he got more than me”) stops being a debate, because the record is right there.
- What about money from grandparents and birthdays?
- Log it as it arrives and it joins the child’s balance. That’s the advantage of a tracker over a card: a fiver in a birthday card counts just as much as a bank transfer.
- My kid is five. Too young?
- For logging their own spending, probably — that starts working around six or seven. But the balance, the automatic weekly top-up and the savings goal work from day one; you just do the logging for a while.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing during beta, for the whole family, and founding households keep the free tier. No per-child pricing, no ads.
- I’m the one holding their money. Does CapKin handle that?
- That’s exactly what it’s for. The “Bank of Mum and Dad” finally gets statements: what’s been credited, what they’ve spent, what’s locked in goals — so when your kid asks to cash out £10, you both already agree on the balance.
- Is it safe for kids?
- Only a parent can set up a child’s access, and everything a child enters waits for a parent’s approval. CapKin collects no personal details from children, shows no ads, sells no data, and voice recordings are deleted the second they’re transcribed. The short, readable version is in the privacy policy.