Questions & answers

Download Cartee, create an account, and make your first list. Private lists are free forever, so there is nothing to pay and nothing to decide yet — a plan only comes into it when you want to share a list with someone.

Yes. Private lists on your phone are free forever, with the full feature set. A Duo or Family plan adds real-time shared lists for your household.

Yes, both.

Ticks appear live while you shop, items sort by your store's aisle order, quantities are built in, and completed items file themselves away instead of piling up.

Yes — every list belongs to a Cartee account, including the free ones. It is worth knowing what that does and does not mean: your private lists live on your phone. The account is who they belong to, not a copy kept on our servers, so signing in on a new phone will not bring them back.

Because household invitations are sent to email addresses, so yours has to be one you genuinely own — otherwise an invitation meant for you could land somewhere else. Signing in with Apple or Google skips the step, since they have already verified it.

Yes, both. You can also use an email address and a password if you would rather.

Yes. Cartee follows your phone's light or dark setting on its own. To choose one yourself, open Account → Preferences → Appearance in Cartee and pick System, Light or Dark. The choice is kept on that phone.

In the app, under your account settings. It removes your account and the data tied to it. If you own a household that other people are in, you are asked to remove them first — deleting your account also deletes the household's shared lists, and they would lose them without having agreed to it. The app walks you through it as part of the deletion. One thing to do separately: if you have a subscription, deleting your Cartee account does not cancel it. Subscriptions belong to your App Store or Google Play account, and only you can cancel them there.

A private list lives on your phone. It is free, there is no limit on how many you keep, it works with no signal, and nobody else can see it. A shared list lives in your household, where everyone sees changes as they happen.

Open the list and choose to share it. If you do not have a plan yet, that is where you will be asked to pick one. After that, every shared list is visible to everyone in your household — there is no separate invitation for each list.

Private lists are unlimited on every plan, including free. How many shared lists you get depends on your plan, and extra lists add more on either plan. If they end, or you move to a smaller plan, the lists used least recently move to Archived, where you can restore them when there's room. See plans and add-ons

It keeps a finished shared list without it counting towards your active limit — useful for something seasonal you will want again. To look at an archived list or change it, restore it first: everything on it comes back exactly as you left it. It applies to shared lists only — a private list has no limit to free up, so you simply keep it or delete it.

Everything keeps working. You can add and tick items with no signal, and your changes sync the moment you're back online.

You enter the email address of the person you want to add, and we send them an invitation. There is nothing to pass around: the link we email is tied to that address, can be used once, and expires after seven days if nobody takes it up.

Tap the Accept invitation button in the email. If you already have Cartee, it opens straight to the invitation. If you do not, you land on a page that explains who invited you and points you to the App Store or Google Play — install Cartee, sign in with the address the invitation was sent to, and it completes itself. There is no code to enter and nothing to copy across.

Duo is two people including you, Family is five. An invitation you have sent holds a place until it is accepted, expires, or you cancel it — so nobody is turned away at the last step of joining. When every place is taken, Duo can move to Family, or you can add someone as a guest on a list instead.

Yes, with a guest pack — for one or three people, on any plan. A guest place is a person, not a list: you can put the same guest on as many of your lists as you like. Guests can add and tick off items on the lists you gave them and see who else is on them, but nothing else of your household. Only the owner invites guests, and if the pack ends or gets smaller, the guests added most recently lose access first.

Tap the Accept invitation button in the email, or sign in to Cartee with the address it was sent to — the list appears under Shared, in its own group. It does not change your own lists or household, and it costs you nothing. You can leave the list whenever you like.

One at a time. Accepting an invitation to another household means leaving the one you are in, and you will be told before it happens rather than after.

Anyone else can leave whenever they like. The person paying cannot simply walk away — that would strand everyone — but they can hand the household over to another member. They turn off renewal first; the time already paid for then moves to the new owner, so the household keeps running until it ends. To keep it after that, the new owner subscribes — and subscribing early loses nothing, because the handed-over time is added on. If you are the only one left in the household, you can leave once renewal is turned off — and that deletes the household and its shared lists.

Yes, if you allow it. When someone adds items to a shared list, ticks items off, or shares one of their lists with the household, everyone else who can see that list gets a notification — the household's members and any guest on that list, but never the person who made the change — and several items added in a row arrive as one notification rather than one each. Cartee asks for permission only once you are in a household or a guest on someone's list, because until then nobody else can change your lists. If you chose Not now, open Account → Preferences → Notifications in Cartee to turn them on; if you told your phone no, that same place offers a button to your phone's settings, where they can be switched back on.

No. One subscription covers the whole household. Everyone else joins free with an invite.

Through the App Store or Google Play, alongside your other subscriptions — they take the payment and send the receipts. If you pay for a household, Account → Subscription & billing in Cartee shows your plan, when it renews and what you have bought, and lets you move from Duo to Family. Cancelling and turning off renewal happen in the store; that same screen takes you there.

Family comes with a 7-day free trial.

While the App Store or Google Play is still retrying a failed payment, nothing changes. Once the subscription has actually ended, everyone in the household can still open the shared lists for 7 days, but nobody can change them — time for the owner to keep a copy on their phone or renew, and for anyone else to make their own. Renewing within 30 days brings everything back — or, after the first 7 days, you can choose to start a new household instead. After 30 days, the household and its shared lists are permanently deleted.