Nestmates

The idea

Most households run on group chats, notes apps and a spreadsheet nobody updates. Things get missed, and the same person ends up remembering everything for everyone. Nestmates puts all of it in one shared space: chores, shopping, pets, bills and dates.

It’s built to feel more like a cosy game than a work tool. Each person has a pixel-art character, and when accounts link up, those characters move into the same little cottage. The point is shared progress. There are no scoreboards and no partner-against-partner stats, just a home that looks after itself a bit better when everyone chips in.

How it works

One person creates the home and gets a join code. Everyone else types it in and they’re in. From then on, everything syncs live. A job ticked off on one phone disappears from the other a second later, and an item added to the shopping list mid-shop shows up straight away.

Jobs can be given to one person or left open for anyone, with optional due dates and gentle reminders. When someone finishes a job, the others get a positive nudge, like “Alex just sorted the recycling ✓”. You never get “Alex still hasn’t done it.”

The cottage

The home screen is a small pixel-art cottage that reacts to what the household is doing. Characters move around depending on what they’ve just done: by the fridge after a shop, or next to the pet bowl after feeding the cat. When all of today’s jobs are cleared, the house lights up warm for the evening.

Tap the cottage to go inside. Every home starts as one small room, and households can grow it over time with a mezzanine or extra rooms on either side.

What we built

• Shared chores, so everyone can see who’s doing what
• A live shopping list the whole house can add to
• Pet care reminders and logs
• Bill reminders and household dates
• Home linking with a simple join code
• Pixel-art characters for every member of the house
• A cottage home screen that reacts to the day’s progress, with an interior you can expand
• Friendly reminders and partner notifications, with quiet settings for each person
• A free tier that’s genuinely useful, plus Nestmates Pro for each household

Under the hood

Nestmates is a Flutter app, so one codebase runs on both iPhone and Android. Firebase handles accounts, live syncing, notifications and server logic, and Firestore security rules keep each household’s data private to its members. RevenueCat manages the Pro subscription and in-app purchases. All the art is pixel-perfect: sprites are scaled in whole steps with no smoothing, so they stay crisp on any screen.

Status

Nestmates is in active development and heading into alpha testing with real households.