Almost every app you can name charges per seat. It is the default because it is easy to explain to investors: more users, more revenue, a line that goes up. For software a company buys, it is also roughly fair, because each extra person really does get their own value out of it.
A household is not a small company
The second adult in a house is not a second customer. They are the same customer, looking at the same grocery list, from a different phone. Charging them again would be charging twice for one thing, and everybody involved would know it.
Worse, per-seat pricing punishes exactly the behaviour that makes the app useful. A shopping list one person keeps is a note. A shopping list the whole house keeps is the reason the app exists. Putting a toll on the second person is charging for the feature working.
So one payer, one household
One person subscribes and everybody under that roof inherits the plan. Two adults, and children on top of that, depending on the tier.
- Nobody else needs their own subscription
- Nobody has a worse version because they were not the one who paid
- Leaving does not strand the others mid-month
Where the money actually goes
Being honest about this is easier than being vague. The costs that scale with a customer are the AI voice calls and the sync storage, and neither scales with how many people share the login. It scales with how much anybody talks to it, which is why the voice allowance is a number rather than a shrug.
If a price cannot be explained in two sentences, it is usually hiding something.
Annual is 30% off, and that is all it is
No countdown, no lifetime deal that only exists for a weekend. Paying for a year costs less because it costs us less to collect once instead of twelve times, and that saving goes back rather than into a marketing line.