Home List vs AnyList

A shared list is the easy part. What decides whether a household app is worth keeping is everything that happens after you write one.

The list is the first step, not the product

Home List runs the whole loop. Anyone in the house adds to the list from their phone and it appears on everyone else’s instantly, sorted into departments so a big shop reads in the order you walk it. When someone arrives at a shop with items unchecked, their phone tells them and the household hears about it. On the way out, photograph the receipt: the line items are read, matched against what was on the list, and the prices recorded. After a few weeks it starts telling you what you are about to run out of, and that goes back on the list.

The list feeds the trip, the trip feeds the record, the record feeds the next list. AnyList does the first step of that and stops.

Their location reminder tells you. Ours tells the house.

AnyList does have location reminders — this page is not going to pretend otherwise — but they sit behind AnyList Complete, and they can only ever notify the person holding the phone. That is not an oversight. Their privacy policy states the app never stores or transmits your device’s location, so there is no mechanism by which it could tell anyone else you had arrived.

Home List’s alert is free, and it goes to the household. Whoever is at home learns that someone is at Aldi with eight items outstanding, and can add the thing they forgot while that person is still walking the aisles — it lands on their phone before the till. No coordinates leave anyone’s device; what travels is the shop name and a count.

It also fires with the app force-quit, posted by native code rather than a web view that has to be awake. We tested that the only way that counts: closed the app, drove to the shop, and confirmed afterwards that the phone had done it alone.

What happens after you have paid for the shopping

This is the half AnyList does not attempt. Scan the receipt and Home List keeps what a list normally throws away — what things actually cost, which shop was cheaper, what the household spends in a month, and which items are due to run out. You can export the lot.

A list forgets an item the moment you tick it. That tick is the only record that the trip happened, and everywhere else it is discarded.

And the rest of what a household runs on

Chores that rotate on a schedule and can be claimed with a tap. A shared calendar that everyone can see, which subscribes into Google, Apple or Outlook so it sits alongside the one you already use. Multiple lists, per shop or general. All free, no ads on any tier.