I'm really happy to hear that there's a hit, at least on two fronts, so I'll take the win.
In terms of the cost, I understand. I knew going into it that offering it as a subscription changes who will use it, and how many people will use it.
I didn't want to do ad-supported because distracting you just while you're thinking about what or how to do something ruins the usability, and ad revenue is not something that could cover the ongoing AI cost for this.
On the other hand, for someone who really liked it, I'd be really interested in your feedback. If you go through the signup, and then immediately cancel in billing, you'll still get the two weeks for free, and then you can see whether there's enough value for the price to be reasonable. You can export your data as many times as you like, and after you've cancelled, you can delete your account, and its data.
There are lots of us building free and open source free stuff who just aren't promoting as much. It's out there, but I do agree.
We could use more free and open source promotion.
Perhaps a hacker news style thread feed where you can only share free stuff?
I used AI to help build it, but this isn't a one-shot app: I did research, UI flows (ascii first, then designs and mocks), code critiques, schema rewrites, performance analysis and tuning.
...and I get the idea that you can vibe-code a very polished looking version of something, and I think that's going to change software development in ways we haven't thought of yet. I think open-source becomes viable with an audience of only one person now, the true long tail.
However, just like you can already see older open source projects, the immediate value pales when compared to long term activity, and one-off projects die fast. (And I've built one-off task management tools for myself before).
I think the real value here is in having something that does all of the work, and without you having to spend your time on it. Just as I'm using Vercel so that I don't have to manage build systems and servers, and Neon so that I don't have to manage a database, I am using this so I don't have to manage my task list.
You need to do some serious work on your presentation, both in your write-up here and in what you show on your homepage.
You spend far too much time interrupting the flow of your write-up describing the product with biographical asides and implementation details. I would place each of these in their own sections/paragraphs -- first few paragraphs describe the product, the next few describe how you did it, the last is for you to talk about your background. This is roughly in order of what your readers are prioritizing and skimming for.
Next, what is shown on the landing page looks like a trivial to-do application with additional polish. Only from reading your write-up do I know it's somewhat more sophisticated than that. I'm not a designer so I can't provide guidance here, but there should be some signal that this app is doing more if you want to command even half of what you're asking pricewise.
And for the love of all that is good, you need to drop the bracketed parentheticals. They are an eye-sore and make your writing painful to read and skim.
Parentheses signal to the reader that while their contents are not essential to understanding the sentence, they might provide useful additional detail. Therefore each time you use one, you impose a little extra friction for the reader. You are asking them to hold a little extra information in mind to understand the sentence.
If your instinct is to bracket something, usually it's a sign you should simply leave it out. But if you really can't imagine leaving it out, then a bracket is probably inappropriate anyway. Most of yours fall into the former category. I would budget at most 2 parentheses for a write-up like this. Most of your sentences contain one, and some have two!
You are nuts if you think anybody in the audience you're targeting will spend $10 per month on a TODO app that you can literally prompt ChatGPT to build for you and handle on your behalf for $20 per month lol
Like, you do get that ChatGPT can be quickly integrated with Gmail to send you a daily email, right? And for those with a bit more gumption, you can hook it up with an additional service to manage a proper task list for you.
This is super cool. But there's a very high likelihood that your past self would not have used this tool. For the simple reason that you wouldn't want company information going out to a third party.
I get the concern. I don't think the characterization is true at all (I've used todoist, I've used asana), but I do care about privacy, and I do care about owning my data, which is why it is at least as easy to take out (if not easier), then it is to put in.
If you use it, your list goes to Anthropic to be ranked, under commercial terms that exclude training on it, and I never look at it (I've built support tools to help customers, but they won't access user data unless the user opens a support case, and then explicitly grants access for a temporary time). It isn't open source, but you can export everything at any time as plain text or JSON.
I also get the company concerns... When I was at Google, there were strict rules, and I used buganizer (among other internal systems), but even at Google there were external companies that were trusted with this kind of data once they'd been reviewed (for example, I used asana while I was at Google).
That's fair. I wanted to share the story, which boils down to: I didn't want a todo list, I wanted software that did all the painful work of a task management system. It does for me what I did for myself when other task systems broke down: reads the list, emails me with three for the day. I built it for myself, and using it convinced me to offer it for sale. I tried to make it as reliable as possible, as fast as possible, and was unwilling to compromise on trust (no training, no use/sale of your data, no looking at your data without explicit recorded consent).
I love that you made this, and that you told your story about why. Clearly a lot of thought went into it, both leading up to and during its construction. Thank you!
Like others, I'm skeptical about the business model. That's not really a knock on you (and I wish you the best of luck), but rather with the whole ecosystem of these kinds of apps. There are three big problems:
- Everyone and their aunt is trying to sell me monthly subscriptions for a few bucks. These add up, both in terms of $ and cognitive overhead (yet another subscription I need to remember to cancel if I stop using it...)
- I don't own this system, I'm just renting it. This is a trade-off I'm less and less willing to make for a whole host of reasons including my ability to vibe code my own thing, open source, enshitification (or, perhaps more likely, you deciding to abandon this project in the future) etc
- All the usual concerns about data security and privacy are heightened right now in this era of super-capable hacking agents and super-creepy AI companies
As a user of things, vibecoding is the most exciting thing about AI. I can make anything I want to use, built exactly as I please. As a maker of things, vibecoding is the most damning thing about AI. Anyone can re-make anything I've made, built exactly as they please.
By the way, I've built my own system with AI to manage my todos. So even though I probably won't use yours in the sense of paying for your service, you have some ideas and themes in here that are really thoughtful and I could see working into my flow.
I converted my post-it based task tracker to an iOS app. It has no subscription, no data leaves your phone, and it costs 2 USD. It’s got no AI features but you can add tasks with siri by way of a shortcut.
Much less ambitious than what 3anddone is trying to do. But If you’re interested, check it out. It’s called “Grask”.
What happens when my ADD riddled brain dumps 500 tasks that are either artifacts of procrastination or a new shiny problem that I want to solve but shouldn't be in this thing?
This is the best use case, you share all 500 things, and we manage them.
We do some organization for you (project creation, or sorting into projects you've already created), and each morning we go over all the open items, using the information you shared, any deadlines, urgency, and if you're waiting on a certain date to start. Then we rank them, and send you the three that come up, with the why, so you can reason over just those three, and correct us if we got it wrong.
And as for aspirational tasks? I had a "clean my office, this week" task that popped up as the third on my list, when the other two were taking me multiple days to do (actual tasks, not projects, just lots of trial and error so they took days), and after ignoring the task for two days, the app asked me if it was really important, and it was right, so I rescheduled it for after launch.
This app is meant to help you get things done, but it can't make you do them. So if you procrastinate, all it can do is read that signal, and offer what help it can (alternatives, reprioritization).
I kind of like the idea because it gives you a different angle of using AI specifically for one area. I think that's the key for a lot of products instead of being extremely broad. However just by intuition I would argue that its to simple and to expensive for this. Do you have plans of building it out to make it the best in this area?
Thank you, and I agree. I want this to do one thing, and do it very well.
As to simple? If I wanted to joke, I'd say that my codebase would disagree, but in reality I see this as somewhat of a knife's edge. On the one side, you have the actual usability, and I've fought over every inch of the UI flows to try and keep them streamlined, useful. But on the other side, there is actual utility, and there are custom shapes for tasks I haven't addressed yet like scheduled tasks (e.g. watering the garden), repeating but varied tasks (e.g. school homework), and I need to make them fit in with the kinds of tasks people already put on a task list, like going to appointments, or personal projects like learning a guitar, work projects where a document must be finished before a presentation.
But the question is one I actually want to hear, and the answer is a resounding yes. I told my testers, when prompted about ideas (calendar integration, rich formatting), that I would have to weigh the utility for my users against the cost in complexity and maintenance, and it puts a silly smile on my face as I think about doing that work.
I'll take the opportunity to ask back to you. What does best in this area mean to you? What else could I be doing?
Nah, I'm not paying to give away my data. But I do really want a good tasks app that is self hostable, end to end encrypted, with great client side apps. Maybe I'll reverse engineer things 3 and make an Android version.
I agree with wanting to own your own data. That's why export was one of the first things I built (JSON and plain text), and why I built rules around user data (no access at all unless a user explicitly grants, and then only temporarily, and only for solving their problem), and tools that respect those rules.
In order to have a system doing the weighing, and the choices, there needs to be something that looks at the list, however, and end-to-end encryption would stop that cold. That's why it had to be on terms that meant no training off of your tasks, and no sales of your data, period. (It's in the terms) . There is audio, but that's so much of a privacy issue that we don't ship it to the servers, ever. It's stored locally on your device, so you can export it, or play it back if it's useful.
There is no self-hosted version of this that I could build and maintain. Other than the trust issue, what changes would a self-hosted version bring for you? Local models only?
I just vibe coded my own and it ended being perfect for me. It has a lot of features, but those features are all things I wanted and evolved with use. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can spend time learning someone else’s system, but in the year of 2026, you can probably but together something you already know how to use just as quickly.
i have a theory that not only is it great that its possible to create your own tool, but its actually the best possible way.
there is no one right system that works for everyone. or as op pointed out even one system that works for a single person as their needs change over time.
the thing that everyone should do is create their own system that works just for them. unfortunately its still a tradeoff even if llm does all the building, upfront effort and ongoing effort to establish the system and maintain/iterate.
the analogy that comes to mind is tailored clothes. most of the asanas etc. of the world are built to fit a broad number of people pretty well, but its people fitting into the clothes. diy is like a tailor cutting the clothes to fit you exactly. and just like tailored clothes vs off the rack, if you change shape the tailored ones are going to be easier to adjust.
I did the same thing. For years I've managed tasks, deadlines, and habits in orgmode. It works well, but I can't always live inside Emacs. So I vibed a desktop and mobile app that checked all my boxes. It'll only work for me and my weird and ancient org-agenda file locations, but has become a game changer for me. No more fighting with systems I don't understand or unneeded features.
If it works for you, then that's great. I'd rather you be a happy customer of your own work, than an unhappy customer of mine. I built this for myself, first, and as I was using it, I had to tune it as new things came up (weekends, vacations, deadlines, etc.) just like you did.
I'd question your "spending time to learn someone else's system", here, though. The UI flows are built around using the app as little as possible. For me, I use voice input with a gesture, so bring out my phone, double-tap, say something, then put it away. I read the email once a day, and tap done 1-3 times a day (either from the email, or directly from the app). That's about all I have to do with it most days.
It's one of my favorite "teach someone AI development" tasks. Almost everyone has some feature they wish existed in a task management app that doesn't line up with any current project, and building your own is so helpful!
App monetization is wild these days. $9.99/month for a todo app with email that was generated with AI.
Meanwhile, an AI subscription starts at $20/month and you can vibe code your own version to suit your preferences and free forever.
I actually love the idea and the web demo, but unfortunately I fully agree with you
I'm really happy to hear that there's a hit, at least on two fronts, so I'll take the win.
In terms of the cost, I understand. I knew going into it that offering it as a subscription changes who will use it, and how many people will use it.
I didn't want to do ad-supported because distracting you just while you're thinking about what or how to do something ruins the usability, and ad revenue is not something that could cover the ongoing AI cost for this.
On the other hand, for someone who really liked it, I'd be really interested in your feedback. If you go through the signup, and then immediately cancel in billing, you'll still get the two weeks for free, and then you can see whether there's enough value for the price to be reasonable. You can export your data as many times as you like, and after you've cancelled, you can delete your account, and its data.
There are lots of us building free and open source free stuff who just aren't promoting as much. It's out there, but I do agree. We could use more free and open source promotion.
Perhaps a hacker news style thread feed where you can only share free stuff?
personally I think the most valuable part is OP's post about their history with task management, what has worked and how they are using AI.
maybe a thread that is just these types of narratives?
I used AI to help build it, but this isn't a one-shot app: I did research, UI flows (ascii first, then designs and mocks), code critiques, schema rewrites, performance analysis and tuning.
...and I get the idea that you can vibe-code a very polished looking version of something, and I think that's going to change software development in ways we haven't thought of yet. I think open-source becomes viable with an audience of only one person now, the true long tail.
However, just like you can already see older open source projects, the immediate value pales when compared to long term activity, and one-off projects die fast. (And I've built one-off task management tools for myself before).
I think the real value here is in having something that does all of the work, and without you having to spend your time on it. Just as I'm using Vercel so that I don't have to manage build systems and servers, and Neon so that I don't have to manage a database, I am using this so I don't have to manage my task list.
You need to do some serious work on your presentation, both in your write-up here and in what you show on your homepage.
You spend far too much time interrupting the flow of your write-up describing the product with biographical asides and implementation details. I would place each of these in their own sections/paragraphs -- first few paragraphs describe the product, the next few describe how you did it, the last is for you to talk about your background. This is roughly in order of what your readers are prioritizing and skimming for.
Next, what is shown on the landing page looks like a trivial to-do application with additional polish. Only from reading your write-up do I know it's somewhat more sophisticated than that. I'm not a designer so I can't provide guidance here, but there should be some signal that this app is doing more if you want to command even half of what you're asking pricewise.
And for the love of all that is good, you need to drop the bracketed parentheticals. They are an eye-sore and make your writing painful to read and skim.
Parentheses signal to the reader that while their contents are not essential to understanding the sentence, they might provide useful additional detail. Therefore each time you use one, you impose a little extra friction for the reader. You are asking them to hold a little extra information in mind to understand the sentence.
If your instinct is to bracket something, usually it's a sign you should simply leave it out. But if you really can't imagine leaving it out, then a bracket is probably inappropriate anyway. Most of yours fall into the former category. I would budget at most 2 parentheses for a write-up like this. Most of your sentences contain one, and some have two!
You are nuts if you think anybody in the audience you're targeting will spend $10 per month on a TODO app that you can literally prompt ChatGPT to build for you and handle on your behalf for $20 per month lol
Like, you do get that ChatGPT can be quickly integrated with Gmail to send you a daily email, right? And for those with a bit more gumption, you can hook it up with an additional service to manage a proper task list for you.
Am I missing something?
This is super cool. But there's a very high likelihood that your past self would not have used this tool. For the simple reason that you wouldn't want company information going out to a third party.
Any plans to open source the harness/skill?
I get the concern. I don't think the characterization is true at all (I've used todoist, I've used asana), but I do care about privacy, and I do care about owning my data, which is why it is at least as easy to take out (if not easier), then it is to put in.
If you use it, your list goes to Anthropic to be ranked, under commercial terms that exclude training on it, and I never look at it (I've built support tools to help customers, but they won't access user data unless the user opens a support case, and then explicitly grants access for a temporary time). It isn't open source, but you can export everything at any time as plain text or JSON.
I also get the company concerns... When I was at Google, there were strict rules, and I used buganizer (among other internal systems), but even at Google there were external companies that were trusted with this kind of data once they'd been reviewed (for example, I used asana while I was at Google).
exactly
With respect, that's a wall of text.
That's fair. I wanted to share the story, which boils down to: I didn't want a todo list, I wanted software that did all the painful work of a task management system. It does for me what I did for myself when other task systems broke down: reads the list, emails me with three for the day. I built it for myself, and using it convinced me to offer it for sale. I tried to make it as reliable as possible, as fast as possible, and was unwilling to compromise on trust (no training, no use/sale of your data, no looking at your data without explicit recorded consent).
I found the text to be the best part
I love that you made this, and that you told your story about why. Clearly a lot of thought went into it, both leading up to and during its construction. Thank you!
Like others, I'm skeptical about the business model. That's not really a knock on you (and I wish you the best of luck), but rather with the whole ecosystem of these kinds of apps. There are three big problems:
- Everyone and their aunt is trying to sell me monthly subscriptions for a few bucks. These add up, both in terms of $ and cognitive overhead (yet another subscription I need to remember to cancel if I stop using it...)
- I don't own this system, I'm just renting it. This is a trade-off I'm less and less willing to make for a whole host of reasons including my ability to vibe code my own thing, open source, enshitification (or, perhaps more likely, you deciding to abandon this project in the future) etc
- All the usual concerns about data security and privacy are heightened right now in this era of super-capable hacking agents and super-creepy AI companies
As a user of things, vibecoding is the most exciting thing about AI. I can make anything I want to use, built exactly as I please. As a maker of things, vibecoding is the most damning thing about AI. Anyone can re-make anything I've made, built exactly as they please.
By the way, I've built my own system with AI to manage my todos. So even though I probably won't use yours in the sense of paying for your service, you have some ideas and themes in here that are really thoughtful and I could see working into my flow.
I really appreciate you sharing this!
I converted my post-it based task tracker to an iOS app. It has no subscription, no data leaves your phone, and it costs 2 USD. It’s got no AI features but you can add tasks with siri by way of a shortcut.
Much less ambitious than what 3anddone is trying to do. But If you’re interested, check it out. It’s called “Grask”.
What happens when my ADD riddled brain dumps 500 tasks that are either artifacts of procrastination or a new shiny problem that I want to solve but shouldn't be in this thing?
This is the best use case, you share all 500 things, and we manage them.
We do some organization for you (project creation, or sorting into projects you've already created), and each morning we go over all the open items, using the information you shared, any deadlines, urgency, and if you're waiting on a certain date to start. Then we rank them, and send you the three that come up, with the why, so you can reason over just those three, and correct us if we got it wrong.
And as for aspirational tasks? I had a "clean my office, this week" task that popped up as the third on my list, when the other two were taking me multiple days to do (actual tasks, not projects, just lots of trial and error so they took days), and after ignoring the task for two days, the app asked me if it was really important, and it was right, so I rescheduled it for after launch.
This app is meant to help you get things done, but it can't make you do them. So if you procrastinate, all it can do is read that signal, and offer what help it can (alternatives, reprioritization).
I kind of like the idea because it gives you a different angle of using AI specifically for one area. I think that's the key for a lot of products instead of being extremely broad. However just by intuition I would argue that its to simple and to expensive for this. Do you have plans of building it out to make it the best in this area?
Thank you, and I agree. I want this to do one thing, and do it very well.
As to simple? If I wanted to joke, I'd say that my codebase would disagree, but in reality I see this as somewhat of a knife's edge. On the one side, you have the actual usability, and I've fought over every inch of the UI flows to try and keep them streamlined, useful. But on the other side, there is actual utility, and there are custom shapes for tasks I haven't addressed yet like scheduled tasks (e.g. watering the garden), repeating but varied tasks (e.g. school homework), and I need to make them fit in with the kinds of tasks people already put on a task list, like going to appointments, or personal projects like learning a guitar, work projects where a document must be finished before a presentation.
But the question is one I actually want to hear, and the answer is a resounding yes. I told my testers, when prompted about ideas (calendar integration, rich formatting), that I would have to weigh the utility for my users against the cost in complexity and maintenance, and it puts a silly smile on my face as I think about doing that work.
I'll take the opportunity to ask back to you. What does best in this area mean to you? What else could I be doing?
Nah, I'm not paying to give away my data. But I do really want a good tasks app that is self hostable, end to end encrypted, with great client side apps. Maybe I'll reverse engineer things 3 and make an Android version.
I agree with wanting to own your own data. That's why export was one of the first things I built (JSON and plain text), and why I built rules around user data (no access at all unless a user explicitly grants, and then only temporarily, and only for solving their problem), and tools that respect those rules.
In order to have a system doing the weighing, and the choices, there needs to be something that looks at the list, however, and end-to-end encryption would stop that cold. That's why it had to be on terms that meant no training off of your tasks, and no sales of your data, period. (It's in the terms) . There is audio, but that's so much of a privacy issue that we don't ship it to the servers, ever. It's stored locally on your device, so you can export it, or play it back if it's useful.
There is no self-hosted version of this that I could build and maintain. Other than the trust issue, what changes would a self-hosted version bring for you? Local models only?
https://aventasks.dev/ may tick some of your boxes. Glad to hear which ones it doesn't
Used to love that app, dont get why there was never Things 4
The gap between 2/2.5 to 3 was a lot longer than any gap between 3 and a theoretical 4.
I just vibe coded my own and it ended being perfect for me. It has a lot of features, but those features are all things I wanted and evolved with use. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can spend time learning someone else’s system, but in the year of 2026, you can probably but together something you already know how to use just as quickly.
i have a theory that not only is it great that its possible to create your own tool, but its actually the best possible way.
there is no one right system that works for everyone. or as op pointed out even one system that works for a single person as their needs change over time.
the thing that everyone should do is create their own system that works just for them. unfortunately its still a tradeoff even if llm does all the building, upfront effort and ongoing effort to establish the system and maintain/iterate.
the analogy that comes to mind is tailored clothes. most of the asanas etc. of the world are built to fit a broad number of people pretty well, but its people fitting into the clothes. diy is like a tailor cutting the clothes to fit you exactly. and just like tailored clothes vs off the rack, if you change shape the tailored ones are going to be easier to adjust.
I did the same thing. For years I've managed tasks, deadlines, and habits in orgmode. It works well, but I can't always live inside Emacs. So I vibed a desktop and mobile app that checked all my boxes. It'll only work for me and my weird and ancient org-agenda file locations, but has become a game changer for me. No more fighting with systems I don't understand or unneeded features.
If it works for you, then that's great. I'd rather you be a happy customer of your own work, than an unhappy customer of mine. I built this for myself, first, and as I was using it, I had to tune it as new things came up (weekends, vacations, deadlines, etc.) just like you did.
I'd question your "spending time to learn someone else's system", here, though. The UI flows are built around using the app as little as possible. For me, I use voice input with a gesture, so bring out my phone, double-tap, say something, then put it away. I read the email once a day, and tap done 1-3 times a day (either from the email, or directly from the app). That's about all I have to do with it most days.
It's one of my favorite "teach someone AI development" tasks. Almost everyone has some feature they wish existed in a task management app that doesn't line up with any current project, and building your own is so helpful!