OurTab vs a note and the group chat
It's a brilliant inbox and a terrible ledger.
This is the system you're really replacing
Not another app — a note in your phone that both of you can edit, a message saying "can you grab milk", a photo of a receipt somewhere in the thread, and a shared sense of who's done more this month.
It deserves more credit than it gets. It's free, it needs no setup, it works on every phone and it's already open. Anything you replace it with has to be quicker to add to than typing one word into a note, or it won't get used, and you'll be back on the note by March.
What it's genuinely good at
- Capture. Nothing beats typing "loo roll" into a note you already have open.
- No structure to fight. Anything can go in it, in any form, at any time.
- Everyone's already in it. No invites, no accounts, nobody to convince.
- It works with no signal. A note doesn't care that the back of the supermarket has no bars.
That last one used to be the honest reason to keep the note. OurTab's shopping list works offline too now — add, change and tick things off with no signal, and it syncs when you're back, telling you plainly what your partner hasn't seen yet.
The one thing it can't do is add up
A note holds what you told it. It doesn't carry anything forward.
So the list gets emptied and everything you bought is gone — the note has no idea what's now in the cupboard, so "do we need passata?" is still a question you answer by walking to the kitchen. The receipt photo scrolls out of the thread within a day. And the running total of who's paid for what lives in two people's heads, which is fine right up until the month one of you notices they've done every big shop and the other genuinely hadn't realised.
That's the failure worth naming: the group chat doesn't cause arguments by being wrong. It causes them by never being written down.
What changes when it's written down
- Ticking off doesn't delete. Bought items become your inventory, so the house knows what it owns.
- The shop logs itself. Paste your supermarket order and every line lands, priced at what you actually paid after offers, split between you.
- Nobody keeps score. The ledger does, quietly, and settles when you want it to.
- Ask it out loud. "What's in the freezer?" and "add ketchup" work by voice, which is about as close to the note's speed as an app gets.
Where the note and the chat are the better pick
If you're two people who split everything down the middle without counting, never disagree about it, and cook whatever's in — the note is perfect and you should keep it. This is a tool for households where the counting has quietly started, or where nobody can remember what's in the freezer. If you'd rather write it down properly but keep it manual, a shared spreadsheet is the honest middle ground.