The Skylight Calendar Max is a 27-inch touchscreen that hangs on your kitchen wall and shows everybody's week, chores included. It is a genuinely nice object. It is also the price of a used car repair, plus a yearly subscription. Here is the money math before you click buy.
Device plus subscription, over the years you keep it 👇
Slide the subscription to $0 to see the cost without the Plus plan.
Strip away the marketing and the Calendar Max is a big wall-mounted touchscreen running one app. It pulls in the calendars you already use, shows the whole family's week at a glance, and lets each kid tick off chores on the way past. The shadow box natural aluminum version is the same device in a nicer frame: a metal snap frame that sits proud of the wall like framed art rather than a tablet stuck to the drywall.
The specs that matter for a wall screen are size, resolution and glare, and it does well on all three.
This is the part that decides whether the sticker price is the real price.
| Feature | What it does | Needs Plus? |
|---|---|---|
| Calendar sync | Pulls in Google, Apple, Outlook and other shared calendars | No |
| Chore checklists | Each kid gets a list to tick off on the screen | No |
| Lists | Groceries and shared to-dos the whole house can add to | No |
| Star rewards | Chores carry star values kids cash in for rewards you set | Yes |
| Meal planning | Plan the week's dinners on the same screen | Yes |
| Magic import | Turns a forwarded school email or a photo of a schedule into events | Yes |
| Custom sidebar | Choose what shows alongside the calendar grid | Yes |
So the honest summary: the calendar works fine without a subscription, but the chore-and-reward system that most families are actually shopping for is part of Plus, which runs $79 a year and covers every Skylight calendar in the house. Bundles like the one linked above pair the device with a plan, which is why the listed price and the price you pay in year two are different numbers.
Every dollar has a next-best use. Here is the honest comparison set.
Same events, same reminders, no hardware. It just is not on the wall where nobody can ignore it.
Still the highest return per dollar in family organizing. Nothing syncs, and somebody has to rewrite it every Sunday.
Skylight and its competitors sell 15-inch models for a lot less. Same software, less wall presence.
The same $630 in a Roth IRA at 17 has decades to compound. That is the real opportunity cost.
If your teen is saving for a car, a matching contribution buys more behavior change than any screen.
Partly. The star chart is built for eight year olds. The visibility is what works on sixteen year olds.
A reward system built on stars is a great engine for a younger sibling. Teens want dollars, keys, and rides, so map chores to real money instead.
A teen with a job has a schedule the whole house has to work around. Putting shifts where everyone sees them kills the "nobody told me" argument.
Add every payday as a recurring event. Money that arrives on a known day is money a teen can budget instead of spend.
Put the savings target and the current number on the screen. A goal you see daily beats a goal in an app you open twice a month.
The fastest way to make a teen hate the screen is to use it as a chore-issuing machine. Let them add their own events and it becomes theirs.
A shared calendar showing where everyone is can tip into surveillance. Agree up front on what goes on the wall and what does not.
Six steps that turn a family calendar into something your kids learn from.
Allowance day, your teen's job paydays, the day the phone bill hits. Money in and money out on the same grid is the simplest budgeting lesson there is.
Some jobs are the price of living in the house and pay nothing. Some are extra and pay. Our allowance guide covers where to draw that line, and the calendar should show both categories clearly.
Write the amount into the chore name: "Mow the lawn, $15." A teen deciding whether to take the job is doing exactly the calculation an adult does with overtime.
Pick one payday a week and stick to it, straight into their own bank account. Irregular cash handouts teach nothing; a predictable paycheck teaches everything.
A family trip, a car fund, a savings target. One number, updated weekly, in a place everybody walks past on the way to the fridge.
Put the Plus renewal on the calendar itself, a week before it bills. If the family stopped using the paid features, that is the moment to cancel rather than the moment you notice the charge.
It is a good product at a price that demands a reason.
No, and yes. The device works out of the box: it syncs your Google, Apple and Outlook calendars, shows chore checklists, and keeps shared lists. But the star rewards system, meal planning, the auto-import of schedules from emails and photos, and the customizable sidebar are all part of Skylight Plus, which is $79 a year. If the reward chart is why you are buying it, treat the subscription as part of the price.
Take the device price and add $79 for every year you keep the Plus plan. A 27-inch Max at around $600 to $630 plus five years of Plus lands near $1,000, or roughly $17 a month. The calculator at the top of this page lets you slide the numbers for your own situation, including setting the subscription to $0 if you plan to skip it.
Only for how it looks. The shadow box frames are a finish option: the screen, the software and the subscription are identical to the classic frame. If the calendar is going on a wall in a room you care about, the metal snap frame does make it read as framed art instead of a mounted tablet. If it is going in a mudroom, save the difference.
It removes the excuse, which is not nothing. What it does not do is create motivation. Teenagers respond to money, autonomy and consequences far more than to stars, so tie the jobs that matter to real payments and keep the screen as the place where everyone can see what was agreed. A calendar is a scoreboard, not a coach.
Most of it, yes. A shared calendar that everyone's phone subscribes to, a free chore app, and a whiteboard on the fridge covers the same ground for about $20. What the money buys is an always-on screen nobody has to open, which is a real advantage in a house where half the family forgets to check their phone and the other half is not allowed one yet.
Use it as the record, not the bank. Let the screen show what was agreed and what got done, then pay on a fixed day into a real account your teen controls. Our parent's guide to teen allowance covers how much to pay and whether to tie it to chores, and the bank account guide covers where the money should land.
Google, Apple, Outlook and several other shared calendar services. Reviewers generally report Google as the smoothest two-way sync, meaning events added on the screen flow back to everyone's phones most reliably. If your household runs on a different calendar, check that specific sync before buying rather than after.