About Ozrie
We built the tool we needed ourselves.
Ozrie was made by people who kept having the same painful, circular argument at home — the one about who actually carries the invisible work — and couldn't find a calm, fair way through it. So we built one.
The problem we lived
Like a lot of households, ours ran on one person quietly noticing everything: the dwindling groceries, the form due Friday, the friend going through a hard time, the shoes that no longer fit. That noticing, planning, and remembering never showed up on any chore chart — but it was exhausting, and it was invisible to the very people we lived with. When we tried to talk about it, it came out as an accusation, and the conversation went nowhere.
We went looking for a tool that would make the invisible part visible without turning it into a scoreboard or a fight. Chore apps only tracked the visible tasks. Spreadsheets felt clinical and quickly went stale. Nothing captured the thing that actually wore us down — the mental load itself.
Grounded in real research, not just our opinions
Our own experience is what motivated Ozrie, but we didn't want to design it on gut feeling. The structure of the app follows how researchers actually describe cognitive and emotional household labor. In particular, Ozrie's five stages — noticing, planning and deciding, doing, following up, and emotional care — mirror the components of cognitive labor identified in the academic literature on the mental load.
The research consistently finds two things that shaped the product: first, that the anticipatory and monitoring work — not the visible chores — is what quietly exhausts people; and second, that partners routinely hold honestly different pictures of who carries it. That "perception gap" is why Ozrie has each person map their own view privately, then compares the two, rather than asking a couple to agree on one shared list up front.
- Daminger, A. (2019). The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor. American Sociological Review — the four components of anticipating, identifying, deciding, and monitoring.
- Dean, L., Churchill, B., & Ruppanner, L. (2022). The mental load: building a deeper theoretical understanding of how cognitive and emotional labor overload women and mothers.
- Time-use research documenting that the mental load falls disproportionately on women even in dual-earner households.
What we believe
Who's behind it
Ozrie is made by a small, independent team — not a big company, and not backed by advertisers. We're partners and parents ourselves, which is exactly why the tool is careful about tone, privacy, and never turning a relationship into a leaderboard. We deliberately keep the team small and the product focused rather than chasing scale for its own sake.
We're not therapists, and Ozrie doesn't pretend to be. For the moments that need a professional, we maintain a curated support directory of therapists, mediators, and coaches, and we're clear about which links are paid partnerships. Everything we publish about the mental load aims to be accurate and grounded; if we get something wrong, we want to hear about it.
How Ozrie stays trustworthy
A few concrete commitments: we don't sell or share your data; we don't run advertising; the community forum is anonymous and every post is human-moderated before it appears; and our legal and privacy pages are written in plain language, not buried fine print. If you ever have a question about how something works or why we made a choice, you can reach a real person at [email protected].