GoHenry, Greenlight and similar apps have genuinely changed how UK families teach money skills — a real prepaid debit card, parental controls, chore tracking. For a lot of families, they're excellent. But they're built around a physical card, which naturally means a minimum practical age, and plenty of parents with a five, six or seven year old find themselves looking for something that fits a younger stage.
Why these apps don't quite fit younger children
A real debit card, however well controlled, introduces real-world complexity — losing a card, understanding a card reader, the concept of a balance that can be spent anywhere. For a five to seven year old, pocket money is usually still a much simpler concept: I did something, I earned something, I can see the total grow. A card-based system is solving a slightly different, slightly later-stage problem.
What actually works well for younger children
A visible, simple running total
At this age, "pocket money" is best understood as a number that goes up when something good happens — not yet a spendable balance with a card attached. A tracker that simply counts earnings, with parents handling the actual payout by hand, matches how most families under 8 already manage pocket money anyway.
Tying it to something the child is already doing
Rather than adding a separate "chores app" on top of an already busy routine, tools that build pocket money into something already happening daily — like reading, spelling or maths practice — need no extra setup and no extra habit to build.
Parent-controlled payout, not an automated card top-up
For younger children particularly, many parents prefer to physically hand over coins or notes when they choose to — it's a concrete, teachable moment — rather than an app automatically loading a card balance in the background.
A natural progression, not a replacement
None of this makes GoHenry-style apps wrong — it just means there's a natural stage before them. A simple pocket-money-for-effort tracker for a five to eight year old, moving on to a real card-based app like GoHenry once they're genuinely ready for that responsibility around age eight or nine, tends to fit most families' actual timeline far better than starting with a card from the beginning.
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