one room, not the whole flat
An ADHD cleaning app for students in shared housing
short answer
Cleaning apps are built for a home you control completely — every room, one schedule, one person deciding. In a shared flat you control one room and negotiate the rest, so a whole-home plan fills with tasks that are not yours and you stop opening it. Nudge works on the part you control: say how long you have and how much is left in you, and it gives you one task that fits. It cannot manage a flat rota, and this page says so before you pay for it.
Written for halls, a shared house, or any arrangement where the mess in your room and the mess in the kitchen are two completely different political problems.
Built from the can't-start problem, not a perfect-home ideal
I build Nudge alone, and I live with executive dysfunction. I designed it around one tiny action, changing capacity, and restarting without a missed-day penalty—the cleaning support I wanted to use myself.
Why the usual apps do not fit
- Most cleaning apps model a home you control end to end: every room, one schedule, one person deciding. A shared flat is one room you control and a kitchen you negotiate.
- Whole-home plans therefore fill up with tasks that are not yours to do, and a list full of things you are not going to do is a list you stop opening.
- Term time is not a repeating week. Three weeks of nothing much, then a fortnight where the room disappears under an essay, then a holiday when you leave entirely.
- Shared-household features tend to sit behind the paid tier in apps that offer them at all, which is a hard sell when the flat cannot agree on a bin rota in the first place.
The part this page will not pretend about
If what you need is a rota that makes four people take turns with the bins, Nudge is the wrong purchase. It has no shared households, no rota, and no reminders for anyone else. The one exception is small: you can send a flatmate a Mochi postcard asking them to take one task, and see their answer. It is one person and their own space.
Apps that do handle shared chores exist and the comparison hub names them, including where they beat Nudge on price. Worth knowing before you start: in some of them, adding the people you wanted to share with is itself the paid feature.
What it asks for
however long you have got
Fifteen minutes or ninety, at whatever energy is left. A gap between lectures counts as a gap.
one thing in your own space
A single step with the room and the minutes it takes, not a whole-flat plan.
What this looks like in a term
Forty minutes between lectures: say twenty, get something that fits in twenty and still leaves you time to walk. Back from the library at midnight with nothing left: say so, and the task is small enough to be real — the four things nearest the door, one surface, the mugs.
Deadline fortnight where the room genuinely disappears: close the app, come back after. Better still, take a break first: no nudges, nothing piles up, and the streak waits. Either way, nothing you earned is taken away. That is the whole design, and it is the reason it survives a term rather than being deleted in week five.
For the room you actually control
Nudge is a subscription for iPhone, billed only through the App Store. Weekly is $2.99 with no trial. Monthly is $6.99 and Annual is $49.99, and both include a 7-day free trial for eligible new subscribers.
Related
Try it before paying anything with the free browser version — no signup, nothing to install. If your week does not repeat for other reasons, the shift-work page covers why weekly schedules break.
Other situations: ADHD cleaning app for shift workers, ADHD cleaning app for parents of toddlers, ADHD cleaning app for late-diagnosed adults.
Questions
Can Nudge manage chores for the whole flat?
No. Nudge is a single-user app with no shared households and no chore rota. The most it does for a flat is ask one person to take one task: a Mochi postcard link they can answer without the app. If splitting communal chores is the problem you are trying to solve, Nudge does not solve it and the comparison hub names apps that do.
So what is it useful for in shared housing?
The part you actually control: your own room, your own dishes, your own corner of the kitchen. You say how long you have and how much is left in you, and it gives you one task that fits that.
What happens during exam weeks when I do not open it?
Nothing turns red, and no plan sits half-finished waiting for you. Take a break before exams and the streak waits too; skip that and it starts again from one when you are back. You open it after two weeks, say how much you have got, and get one task. Mochi's Place keeps every room you filled in.
Does it work in a room where I cannot make noise?
Voice guidance is optional and can be switched off. Start Rescue can read one physical step aloud when that helps, and the on-screen version works silently when a flatmate is asleep on the other side of the wall.
Is there a student discount?
No. Weekly is $2.99 with no trial, Monthly is $6.99 and Annual is $49.99, and Monthly and Annual include a 7-day free trial for eligible new subscribers. The weekly plan exists partly because it is the smallest commitment, but it is the worst value per week and it has no trial.
How we checked, and when
Nudge's own plan details and the single-user limitation described here was read on 2026-09-15 from the company's own website or its current App Store listing. What a gap does to Nudge's streak, and what a Mochi postcard can and cannot do, were checked against Nudge 1.3.5 on 2026-10-13. Apps change their prices, their billing providers and their cancellation flows. Confirm anything that matters to you before you subscribe or cancel, and tell us if something here is out of date: support.
Nudge organizes cleaning tasks; it does not diagnose or treat ADHD.