Sleigh List

Overview

Sleigh List holds everyone you buy for, everything you plan to give them, and what it all costs. Give each person a budget and the list one, and the app does the arithmetic: spent, planned and remaining, per person and overall, to the penny.

Money is stored as integer minor units throughout. Currency in a budgeting app is not a place for floating point, and the fix is cheaper before the first release than after.

Four Stages, One Shopping List

Every gift is an idea, bought, wrapped or given. Tapping the pill moves it along. That single piece of state is what makes the shopping view work: it groups every gift for everybody by stage with a running total for each group, so the screen you open in a shop shows exactly what is still to buy.

A gift also carries the shop or link it came from and who it is from, for households that give presents together. Both exist because the alternative is remembering, and this is an app for people who are already juggling twelve of these.

Secret Mode

Turn it on and gift names render as dots until you tap one. Prices and budgets stay visible.

It is there for one specific moment: opening the app at the kitchen table with the people the presents are for sitting across from you. It is not security — anyone can tap a row — and it is not sold as security. It is the difference between the app being usable in December and being usable only alone.

Nothing Is Locked Away

Budgets, the shopping list, secret mode, the year archive, reminders and sharing all work on the free list. The only limit is the number of people, and one $3.99 payment removes it along with the advertising.

That shape is a direct response to the category. The incumbent’s entire one-star cluster is feature-gating and features that used to be free disappearing behind a paywall, so the app is built to have nothing it could do that to. Ads appear at natural stopping points only — after a gift is marked bought, after a year is filed away, after a list is shared — never while typing, and never when secret mode is switched on.

A New Year in One Tap

When Christmas is over, the year is archived and a fresh list starts. Everyone carries over with their budgets; the finished year stays readable and shareable. Buying the unlock once covers every Christmas after it, and the archived years come with it.

Current State

Sleigh List 1.0 is with App Review, submitted on 9 September 2026 — the first of the three utilities to get there, and the one with a real deadline attached, since a Christmas gift app that lands in December has missed its year.

The domain layer is covered by 111 tests across six suites: budget arithmetic, the status ladder, archiving, the free-tier limit, serialisation repair, money parsing and formatting, reminder dates, export text, and storage rotation after a crash. None of that needs a device to run, which is the point of keeping the domain pure.