Your co-parenting app should not be the thing that moves the money.
Every expense tool in this category eventually adds a pay button. That is the moment it stops being a record. The fees are only the first cost.
Every co-parenting app that tracks a child's expenses eventually adds a button to pay them. It looks like a convenience. It is the moment the tool stops being a record and starts being a bank, and the two of you pay for the difference with a fee, with your bank details, and with a harder kind of argument.
The fee is the first thing you notice, and the least of it.
Look at what the payment rails in this category cost. TalkingParents' Accountable Payments charges a percentage of each transfer that falls with the plan tier, 4 percent on Essentials, 3 percent on Enhanced and 2 percent on Ultimate, on transfers between $10 and $5,000 that settle in five to seven business days. OurFamilyWizard's OFWpay page says there is no fee to send or receive, then adds that transaction fees depend on your subscription package, your add-ons and the version of OFWpay you're using, and lists a $25.00 charge for a returned payment. AppClose does not publish its ipayou fees on its pricing page at all.
Run the arithmetic on one ordinary month. Sam and Jordan's September ledger has $468.00 logged. Paid share by share, that is $234.00 crossing between them before anything nets out. At 4 percent, a rail takes $9.36 of it, every month, on top of the per-parent subscription each of you already pays. That isn't ruinous. It's the price of a thing you never needed.
A payment rail needs your bank details, and a ledger does not.
Money can't move without an account to move from. So an app that pays has to link your bank, verify it through a third party, store the connection and keep it current. SupportPay's own terms say it does not collect, hold or transfer funds directly, and that transfers between users are facilitated by third-party providers, which its terms name as Usio and Mastercard's Finicity among others. That is a reasonable way to build a payment product. It is also more companies holding data about you and your co-parent, for the sake of a transfer you could have made from the banking app already on your phone.
A ledger asks for none of it. Ravencove never links a bank account, never stores a card for reimbursements and never asks for a Venmo, Zelle or PayPal handle, because there is nothing for it to send. When the September balance shows that Jordan owes Sam $63.50, that figure leaves the two of them the way it always did, from one banking app to another, and all the ledger keeps is the settled mark and the word written beside it. The federal definition of money transmission, at 31 CFR 1010.100, is accepting funds from one person and transmitting them to another. A record that never accepts funds isn't doing that, and so it never has to build the machinery that would.
A dispute inside a payment is worse than a dispute about a receipt.
This is the part the category doesn't advertise. When the record and the payment are the same object, a question about an entry becomes a question about a transfer. Jordan questions the $65.00 camp deposit, and now the question is whether the money is held, reversed or returned with a fee, and whether the request expired while nobody was looking. A ledger that stays out of the money has a much smaller problem. The entry is marked Questioned, Sam answers in a one-line thread both of you can read, and either the figure gets confirmed or it doesn't. Nothing was in flight. Nobody's account was touched. The argument stays the size of the receipt, which is the right size for it.
Settling outside the app looks like this.
The worry about a ledger that doesn't pay is that nothing will happen. In practice the settling was always going to happen somewhere else, and the app was only adding a toll booth on the way. Sam logs $120.00 of soccer fees on September 8 with the receipt. Jordan confirms $60.00 the next morning. On September 15 Jordan sends $60.00 by Zelle and marks the request settled, with the date and the word "Zelle" in the note. The balance updates for both of them. The record shows who logged, who confirmed, who settled and when, down to the minute, and it would show the same if the $60.00 had been cash handed over at the sideline.
The record is the product, and the money already has a way home.
An app has to choose what it's for. If it's for moving money, it will be judged by the rail: the fees, the limits, the settlement days, the returned-payment charge. If it's for the record, it will be judged by whether both of you trust what it says. Those are different products with different costs, and the category has mostly treated them as one thing.
Separated parents already have Zelle, Venmo, checks and cash. What they've lacked is a ledger with no interest in the money, one that can afford to be plain about who logged what and when because it has nothing else to sell. Ravencove is built to be that ledger, priced per family at $6.99 a month on Mooring, with no fee on anything that moves between you because nothing moves through it. You can compare both plans on the Plans page.