The Best Free Bin Day Reminder Apps in the UK (2026)

I build Kepthouse, which has bin day reminders as one of its features. So I'm not a neutral party here. But because Kepthouse is a broader home-maintenance app rather than a dedicated bin app, I genuinely wanted to know what the competition looks like — both to make sure my own product holds up, and so I can tell users honestly when something else might fit them better.

This week I went through every free UK bin day reminder app I could find on the Play Store and the wider web. Here's what's actually out there, how each one works, and where the trade-offs sit. Everything below is from the apps' own websites, App Store and Play Store listings, and (in the cases that are open source) their GitHub repositories. Where I couldn't verify a number, I've said so rather than guess.

Coverage is the headline number

The single most important question for any of these apps is "does it support my council?" If the answer is no, nothing else matters — the prettiest UI in the world is useless if it doesn't know when your bin goes out. So before anything else, here's what each app actually covers.

The blunt version: if BinDays, BinsOut or MyBins doesn't have your council, the chances are very high that Kepthouse will. Kepthouse currently supports more than three times as many UK councils as any other free app I could find. That's not a coincidence — it's the result of constant maintenance work, which I'll come back to in the Kepthouse section.

Coverage isn't the only axis that matters, though, so the rest of this post walks through what each app is actually good at.

BinDays

The most genuinely interesting app in the list, and the one I'd recommend without hesitation if it covers your council. Built by Andrew Riggs (under the GitHub handle BadgerHobbs), BinDays is fully open source under AGPL-3.0, with a Flutter mobile app, a C# backend API, and a separate Dart client library. Available on both Android and iOS, with a 4.8-star rating on the App Store at time of writing.

What makes BinDays novel is the architecture. The API does not run scrapers on a server — it generates request configs (URLs, headers, payloads) and ships them down to the app, which fires the actual HTTP request to the council from your phone, then sends the raw response back to the API for parsing. The benefit: requests come from your home IP, not a server, so the app dodges the rate limits and CAPTCHAs that plague server-side scrapers. It's a clever piece of engineering and the maintenance pipeline behind it (daily integration tests, an AI-driven workflow that picks up new-council requests and writes the implementation automatically) is the most modern open-source bin-tooling I've seen.

The catch — and it's the only catch, but it's a big one — is council coverage. The repo currently has 94 council-specific collectors plus a handful of vendor base classes. Anything that needs a real headless browser session (heavy JavaScript, Cloudflare challenges, reCAPTCHA) is much harder to support with the device-side request model, because the request has to reduce to plain HTTP that a Dart Dio client can replay. So for a meaningful chunk of the UK, BinDays simply can't help.

Best for: users in a council BinDays already covers, who care about open source, and who like the idea that their phone — not a third-party server — is doing the talking to their council. Try it first; if your postcode works, it's a lovely app.

BinsOut

A community project by CommunityTech, available as an iOS app and an email reminder service, with an Android version listed as in beta. Coverage is 78 UK councils per their homepage, including most large cities (Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff). They check the council's live data daily at 6pm and send the reminder out at 6pm the night before collection — bank holiday adjustments included automatically.

The email-only option is genuinely nice if you don't want yet another app on your phone. No premium tier, no upsell.

Best for: users who want zero friction (email only, no install), or who want a no-frills iOS app focused on the one job — and whose council happens to be on the list of 78.

MyBins

A different model. MyBins is sold to councils as a back-office product, and councils that buy in get a branded experience for their residents. It's free to download, available on both iOS and Android, and the data comes from a proper integration with the council's systems rather than a scraper — so things like missed collections and service requests can flow back the other way.

The catch: it only works in councils that have actually bought MyBins. Their site doesn't publish a list, so the only way to know whether your council is covered is to install it and try your postcode. If your council is on board, this is probably the best experience — the app knows about your specific bin, not just the schedule. If they're not, the app does nothing for you.

Best for: users in a council that's contracted with MyBins, especially anyone who actually wants to report missed collections from the app.

Bin Reminder (Retfunsoft)

Worth mentioning so you know what you're getting. Despite the name and the keyword-friendly Play Store listing, Bin Reminder doesn't look up your council. You enter the schedule manually — "general waste every other Tuesday, recycling on the alternate Tuesday, garden waste fortnightly on Friday" — and the app reminds you. It's a customised calendar, not a council-aware tool.

That's not a criticism: if your council doesn't publish a usable schedule, or you live somewhere none of the other apps cover, a manual schedule is genuinely useful. But it's a different category, and worth knowing before you install it expecting the app to figure things out for you.

Best for: users in councils none of the other apps support, or anyone who doesn't trust automated lookups and would rather just enter the schedule once and forget about it.

Your council's own app

Most UK councils ship their own bin app, often built by a third party (Bartec, Veolia, Whitespace, Civica). The good news: it's connected directly to the council's own back-office systems, so missed-collection reports and bank holiday changes are first-party. The bad news: the user experience varies wildly. Some are excellent. Some haven't been updated in two years. And every one of them is single-council only — useless if you have a second property elsewhere, or if you move.

Worth a try if you have a single property and your council's app is well-rated. Worth skipping if you've ever owned more than one home in your life.

The smaller ones

Binday.uk — A lovely project by Nemiah Limited, with an open API, a web app, an Android app, and an Alexa Skill. It only covers Wigan Council, though, which limits the audience.

Bin-Ovation — Free consumer app focused as much on what-goes-in-which-bin guidance as on collection reminders. Coverage isn't published.

MyBinDay — Free, available on iOS and Android, surfaced in a few comparison roundups. I couldn't verify their coverage from public sources, so I won't claim a number.

Waste Wisdom / What Bin Day — Not really a competitor. It's a B2B product councils use to power their own bin tools; you'd download the council's branded app, not "What Bin Day" itself.

How Kepthouse fits in

Kepthouse isn't a bin app. It's a home maintenance app — tasks, warranties, MOTs, appliances, projects, contacts, pets, plants, properties — that has bin day reminders as one of its features. So whether it's the right pick for you depends on whether you want one app for everything, or just want bin reminders and nothing else.

On the bin reminders themselves: Kepthouse covers more than 320 UK councils, and 96.7% of those are passing automated tests as of this month's audit. To my knowledge that's the broadest working coverage of any free UK consumer app available today. The question worth answering is how, because raw coverage is meaningless if the integrations have rotted.

Why the coverage is so much wider

The bin scraper layer in Kepthouse is built on top of UKBinCollectionData, an open-source community project (MIT licensed) that supports more than 330 UK councils out of the box. That's the starting point. On top of that I run a pile of additional infrastructure that no consumer-facing app I've found bothers with:

• A residential SOCKS5 proxy for the roughly thirteen councils whose websites are behind Cloudflare or other anti-bot protection. Server-side scrapers normally fail outright on these because data-centre IPs are blocked — the proxy routes those specific requests through a residential connection so they look like a normal home browser.
• A Selenium Grid running on the server for the councils whose schedule is only reachable through a real browser session (heavy JavaScript, dynamic forms, reCAPTCHA-protected lookups).
• Twice-weekly automated tests hitting every council's real lookup flow, with email alerts and an admin dashboard showing which councils are passing, failing, or empty. When something breaks I know about it within 48 hours, not when a user reports it.
• A patched fork of the upstream scrapers with my own fixes for any council the open-source version has missed or broken. Whenever I fix one, the patch goes back to the upstream project as a pull request — so the wider community benefits, even though the merge cycle there is slow.

Why this matters: councils change their websites all the time

This is the part nobody else seems to talk about. Council bin pages aren't stable. They redesign, swap suppliers, add CAPTCHA, change URL formats, rename their JSON fields, switch from postcode lookup to UPRN lookup. Every one of those changes silently breaks any app that scrapes them. If nobody's actively watching, "we support 80 councils" quietly becomes "we used to support 80 councils, now half of them return empty results."

The twice-weekly test run is what catches that. The fork is what lets me ship a fix the same day rather than waiting on someone else's release cycle. The proxy is what keeps the difficult councils working at all. None of it is glamorous, and none of it is something you'd notice as a user — you'd just notice if it wasn't happening, in the form of an app that gradually stops working for more and more people.

So the practical answer to "should I use Kepthouse for bins?" is: if any of the other apps don't have your council, try Kepthouse. The odds are very high your council is supported. And if it isn't, drop me a line and I'll add it.

The reminders themselves

The reminder works the same way most of these apps do: enable bin tracking on a property, the app detects your council from your address, and you get a push notification the evening before collection telling you which bins to put out. Default reminder time is 7pm, configurable in Settings. Each property gets its own card on the dashboard with upcoming collection dates colour-coded by urgency. The full breakdown is in the launch post for the feature.

And because bin day is just one notification among many, the same app reminds you when your MOT is due, when your boiler service is overdue, when a warranty is about to expire, when the dog needs flea treatment. If you're already juggling those things across calendars, notes, and spreadsheets, swapping in one app that does all of it tends to be a better outcome than installing five single-purpose ones.

Where Kepthouse loses: the Android app itself isn't open source. The bin scraper layer is — that part of the stack lives in the upstream UKBinCollectionData project — but the app isn't. If open source is non-negotiable for you, BinDays is the answer (and a genuinely good one).

Honest summary

• Want open source above all else, and your council is on their list? BinDays.
• Want zero friction, just an email the night before, and your council is in their 78? BinsOut.
• Lucky enough to be in a MyBins-contracted council? MyBins, for the missed-collection reporting.
• Live in a council nobody covers, or distrust auto-lookups? Bin Reminder (manual schedule).
• Single property, council has a well-rated app? The council's own app is usually fine.
• Multiple properties, want one app that handles bins alongside the rest of your home admin, or none of the others have your council? Kepthouse.

None of these apps cost anything to install, so the cheapest answer is to try whichever one best matches your situation, and switch if it doesn't work for your council. But if you're starting from scratch and you don't know which apps will support your area, Kepthouse is the safest bet on coverage alone.

Try Kepthouse

If you want to see whether Kepthouse covers your council — and pick up the rest of the home maintenance features while you're at it — it's free on Google Play.

For the full breakdown of how the bin day feature works in Kepthouse — the property toggle, the dashboard cards, the evening notifications — see the launch post for the feature.