Article
Reminders shouldn’t be a premium feature
A scheduled notification costs fractions of a cent to deliver. So why does the biggest to-do app charge $5 a month for custom reminders? The economics of the reminder paywall.
Todoist is a genuinely good task manager. Its free "Beginner" plan covers the basics. But custom reminders — being notified about a task at a specific time, at a location, on a repeating schedule — sit on the Pro tier: $5/month billed annually, $7 monthly. That's $60 to $84 a year for notifications.
Your phone's operating system delivers those notifications. The marginal cost of one more scheduled alert is effectively zero. So what are you paying for?
What the subscription actually funds
This is the fair version of the story, and it matters: Todoist employs a real team, runs sync infrastructure across every platform, and maintains one of the best-designed task apps ever made. The reminder paywall isn't covering the cost of the reminders — it's covering the company, and reminders were the feature they chose as the lever.
That's a legitimate business. It's also a choice you can decline. A smaller, local-first task app has no sync infrastructure to fund and no team of hundreds — so the reminder costs what it costs, which is nothing, and the app can be free.
The pattern to watch
Reminders are the canary. When a utility app paywalls the thing your OS does natively — notifications, widgets, offline access — it's telling you the subscription is load-bearing for the business, not the feature. Other signs: recurring tasks on the paid tier, "advanced" filters that are just saved searches, collaboration limits calibrated to annoy exactly one family member.
None of this is fraud. It's pricing strategy, and pricing strategy is information. The question is always: does the price match the value to you?
The minimum viable to-do app
Free reminders — time, location, repeating. Natural-language quick add, because a task app lives or dies on capture speed. Recurring tasks without a paywall. Offline, because a list shouldn't need a server. And no account, because a to-do list is not a social network.
Microsoft To Do is free and covers most of this, if you don't mind the Microsoft account. Anything you pay for beyond that should be buying you something real — not the notification your phone was going to send anyway.
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