I'm a software engineer from the east coast (who has lived in Boston, NY, the
bay area, UK, France), and I built a task system called 3 & Done. It's the
place you trust to store everything you need to do. It accepts voice input for
rapid entry, as well as text (it stores the audio locally so you can listen to
jog your memory) and emails you every morning with the three most important
things for you to do that day, and why, based on what you've said about the
task: deadlines, urgency, sitting too long.
I've been at software engineering for about 44 years now... Grew up with it,
which was unusual when I started, and I was always good about getting into the
zone and doing things. The career started small, small company, then back
office, the dot com startups, then smaller companies again after the bust,
a non-profit, and eventually YouTube (Google at the time, but just barely) and
Meta (just Facebook when I was there).
When I hit the startups, and later big tech, it was no longer enough to just be
an engineer, to have drive, to be good, you had to be organized, you had to
follow through, get stuff done, and that's where the task systems started.
Twenty-five over the years (and yes, I've actually counted), from Moleskine
notebooks with Getting Things Done, evernote (remember evernote?), bug trackers,
todoist, asana, google keep, among others.
When I managed on the Facebook News Feed, I got into gantt charts (for me and my
team), spreadsheets, OmniPlan... I remember apologizing to my director for being
so disorganized (because I felt I was making a mess of it), and he told me that
I was the most organized engineer he knew.
That was because I was doing all of the work in the background, the trimming,
the sorting, the reviews, but it was just so much work. Which was why I changed
from system to system. Each time it built up, and I had to spend more time
looking at things I couldn't or didn't get done, when I was rushed and couldn't
put time into today's review, it would pile up, and then using it was so much
work that I would start taking mini-notes, just emailing myself a few things to
do the next day.
That's actually the thesis of the app (but not where it started), that if
I could just have a few things to do emailed to me each day, I could get it
done.
This app actually started when I described my previous startup failures into
a Claude web session, and it repeated back to me what I had just said. My
previous failures were because I spent too much time building the stuff
I needed, and not building what I was supposed to be building.
I decided that the app would email me three things to do every day (which
matches best practices for attention), but that the day was always yours to
decide. We won't overload you, but you can add more, if you're feeling up to
it, or cut back, and we never shame and try our best not to nag (I often only
finish two). If we get it wrong, you can tell us, and we'll re-rank it once
a day, or you can set it manually, and if you do, we never override that
choice. The web app is live, and native for both platforms is coming. In the
meantime, on Android, you can use gestures to quick launch into the voice input
so saving a task is only a gesture away (e.g. double-tap the back of a Pixel,
double-press the power button on Motorola).
Now let's talk about the dirty parts. I used AI to help me build this.
Anthropic models mostly, and the brains of the app come from Anthropic models (I
like the quality, I like the privacy, absolutely no training on customer data,
and the stance of the company). This app is not some one-shot wonder where
I asked frontier models to build a task system and then I put it on a server to
show you.
I have prompts for the various features (e.g. ranking, generating suggestions,
task extractions), I have eval sets of task lists (not anyone's real tasks, but
constructed from patterns in my tasks, or the tasks of testers who allowed me to
fix the problems they were having)...
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 created this one: https://github.com/Itaypk/Taskboard
There's a hosted version running on https://backlog.fyi. It ticks the self-hosted and end-to-end encrypted boxes, though no client side apps (which I don't know if needed - the mobile UI is good, why bother with a native app?).
Works great for me. Slightly different principle than this one, but not far off - same idea of helping you quickly dump whatever's on your mind, and the recall is through a weekly planning session, not a daily email.
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.
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?
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.
Yes, you can build something with ChatGPT if you have a $20 subscription, and I'm sure that there are people who have already done that.
If you go that route, you do need a place to store your list that your assistant can see. For this app, it is the one and only place your task list lives, with voice input, and the UI has been tailored over many iterations, to make the common use cases as simple and as obvious as possible.
Getting an email to work the way this one does will take trial and error, because this one's not a summary, it's intentional choices, with the rationale, and it's complemented by the UI to customize your day.
Handling the prompts, as they change, will take work, and if you're using scheduled prompts, you'll need a way to know whether your new prompt works. I keep an eval set because the prompt change you make today can fail in subtle ways when looking at a different set of tasks. I've seen this nearly every time I've made a prompt change.
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.
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!
Thank you. It's a fair criticism, and I'll take note.
For the landing page, that's good to know. I didn't catch that, and I need to fix it, though I could definitely use your help with some specifics, if you're willing. I linked straight to the trial page. Is your criticism about that page, specifically, or about the home page?
What came out here that did not come across over there? Not speaking to design elements, but what could have told you it does more?
Am I the bad guy here - I felt great to hear more than just about the features. It's supposed to be adding a cultural backstory, it's not a rocket that the guy is building.
I tried to build a todo app a few years ago with a similar thesis -- that the problem with todo apps was triaging the list.
So we built an app that did it for you, just like yours, using machine learning and AI (and some simple rules based on due date and expected time to do the task).
Turns out people don't want to pay for that, even at $2/mo. We even had group features, so that a parent could put tasks on their kid's list, or a group of students could use it for a group project, or a team at work could use it to coordinate team tasks.
We also had templates -- tell us you're a single person who lives alone, and we would auto-add tasks like washing the sheets and cleaning the toilets. Or we could add a daily exercise routine or even a daily bible study if you told us you were a religious Christian.
Feel free to take these features. I hope you have better luck than I did.
Thanks. That's both encouraging, and sobering, at the same time.
I'd love to know more about how that played out, two questions actually: 1) did people not sign up, or did they sign up and leave? 2) for the ones who left, did they dislike the triage, or did they think it was great and just not want to pay for it?
Getting the answers to those would help me choose where to focus first.
I've used it every morning since June, with incredible delight in what it does for my days, so I'm still going to try to find users who find the same value that I do.
I take your point. It's not the first llm-assisted app I started writing, but it is the first one I'm launching, so I guess that counts.
I'm hoping the answer to that is the same reason I built it, which is that proper task management is actually hard work. I think we like to fool ourselves into believing that if we removed this friction or that friction, we would just start the habit of managing our tasks, and only then would we get stuff done.
This app is about getting off that track, and just doing things instead. You might use it differently, but I've built it so that I only barely use the app. It's almost like a note taker, I just say the things I need to do into it, and check my email in the morning.
There are already a decently large number of todo apps that don't have AI. They compete on audience, and integrations, so it's hard to differentiate and hard to deliver value worth switching. This one doesn't just add an AI chat interface, it uses the strengths of a model, handling arbitrary input, and re-reads your list every single day without getting bored or overwhelmed.
It's a prompt to a model with a set of rules that were built up from my usage (and those of testers) from roughly the last four months. It takes into account a deadline, if you specified one, urgency if mentioned, the text of the task itself. It looks at the age of the task, and its activity, the project, and it gets the whole list every morning. The model chooses three, and the reasons behind those three. I know it works, because I've used it and tuned the rules. When it got it wrong, I fixed it, using evals to make sure the existing cases didn't break.
I've managed everything from large-scale software projects to small personal projects using a simple, prioritized to-do list. Sometimes in a .txt file, sometimes in Excel. The format really doesn't matter.
It works beautifully, and I've never felt the need for anything more complicated.
Great story and smart design choice using AI for background triage rather than just chat clutter. The voice-to-inbox flow is genuinely appealing—excited to see how this evolves!
I like that it gives back only three things, with the reason for each. The reason is the part that would make me trust the list. I run a freemium app myself, so I'm curious how you chose $99 a year. Did you try other prices first?
I've taken a somewhat different approach, although more reliant on voice. Tied up a phone number to some agent/llm service, tied to some APIs on some of my own code, and I have a system that calls me regularly to let me brain dump. I can tell it what I need to get done, it can remind me of things I mentioned before, clear things that are no longer important or required, etc. The key for me is the incoming call - something that regularly pings me and lets me just... talk it out, then sorts it out for me - it's useful. There's probably folks already doing some of this with claude and whatnot, but this also gave me some ability to learn how the best way to fit some of these together. Or... at least a way - might not be the best way yet :)
That's neat, did you wire a voice model to your own backend, or do you use something off-the-shelf and seed the context and save the output?
Personally, I tend to dodge phone calls, but it's true that I use this mostly with voice. Rather than having something talk back to me, I'm using a gesture and talking to it.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 19.7 ms ] threadI've been at software engineering for about 44 years now... Grew up with it, which was unusual when I started, and I was always good about getting into the zone and doing things. The career started small, small company, then back office, the dot com startups, then smaller companies again after the bust, a non-profit, and eventually YouTube (Google at the time, but just barely) and Meta (just Facebook when I was there).
When I hit the startups, and later big tech, it was no longer enough to just be an engineer, to have drive, to be good, you had to be organized, you had to follow through, get stuff done, and that's where the task systems started. Twenty-five over the years (and yes, I've actually counted), from Moleskine notebooks with Getting Things Done, evernote (remember evernote?), bug trackers, todoist, asana, google keep, among others.
When I managed on the Facebook News Feed, I got into gantt charts (for me and my team), spreadsheets, OmniPlan... I remember apologizing to my director for being so disorganized (because I felt I was making a mess of it), and he told me that I was the most organized engineer he knew.
That was because I was doing all of the work in the background, the trimming, the sorting, the reviews, but it was just so much work. Which was why I changed from system to system. Each time it built up, and I had to spend more time looking at things I couldn't or didn't get done, when I was rushed and couldn't put time into today's review, it would pile up, and then using it was so much work that I would start taking mini-notes, just emailing myself a few things to do the next day.
That's actually the thesis of the app (but not where it started), that if I could just have a few things to do emailed to me each day, I could get it done.
This app actually started when I described my previous startup failures into a Claude web session, and it repeated back to me what I had just said. My previous failures were because I spent too much time building the stuff I needed, and not building what I was supposed to be building.
I decided that the app would email me three things to do every day (which matches best practices for attention), but that the day was always yours to decide. We won't overload you, but you can add more, if you're feeling up to it, or cut back, and we never shame and try our best not to nag (I often only finish two). If we get it wrong, you can tell us, and we'll re-rank it once a day, or you can set it manually, and if you do, we never override that choice. The web app is live, and native for both platforms is coming. In the meantime, on Android, you can use gestures to quick launch into the voice input so saving a task is only a gesture away (e.g. double-tap the back of a Pixel, double-press the power button on Motorola).
Now let's talk about the dirty parts. I used AI to help me build this. Anthropic models mostly, and the brains of the app come from Anthropic models (I like the quality, I like the privacy, absolutely no training on customer data, and the stance of the company). This app is not some one-shot wonder where I asked frontier models to build a task system and then I put it on a server to show you.
I have prompts for the various features (e.g. ranking, generating suggestions, task extractions), I have eval sets of task lists (not anyone's real tasks, but constructed from patterns in my tasks, or the tasks of testers who allowed me to fix the problems they were having)...
Any plans to open source the harness/skill?
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).
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.
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.
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?
Meanwhile, an AI subscription starts at $20/month and you can vibe code your own version to suit your preferences and free forever.
...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.
Adding some narrative to it made it more interesting to me, not less. I actually saw the post because of the wall of text and enjoyed reading it!
Much less ambitious than what 3anddone is trying to do. But If you’re interested, check it out. It’s called “Grask”.
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).
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?
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?
If you go that route, you do need a place to store your list that your assistant can see. For this app, it is the one and only place your task list lives, with voice input, and the UI has been tailored over many iterations, to make the common use cases as simple and as obvious as possible.
Getting an email to work the way this one does will take trial and error, because this one's not a summary, it's intentional choices, with the rationale, and it's complemented by the UI to customize your day.
Handling the prompts, as they change, will take work, and if you're using scheduled prompts, you'll need a way to know whether your new prompt works. I keep an eval set because the prompt change you make today can fail in subtle ways when looking at a different set of tasks. I've seen this nearly every time I've made a prompt change.
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.
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!
For the landing page, that's good to know. I didn't catch that, and I need to fix it, though I could definitely use your help with some specifics, if you're willing. I linked straight to the trial page. Is your criticism about that page, specifically, or about the home page?
What came out here that did not come across over there? Not speaking to design elements, but what could have told you it does more?
So we built an app that did it for you, just like yours, using machine learning and AI (and some simple rules based on due date and expected time to do the task).
Turns out people don't want to pay for that, even at $2/mo. We even had group features, so that a parent could put tasks on their kid's list, or a group of students could use it for a group project, or a team at work could use it to coordinate team tasks.
We also had templates -- tell us you're a single person who lives alone, and we would auto-add tasks like washing the sheets and cleaning the toilets. Or we could add a daily exercise routine or even a daily bible study if you told us you were a religious Christian.
Feel free to take these features. I hope you have better luck than I did.
I'd love to know more about how that played out, two questions actually: 1) did people not sign up, or did they sign up and leave? 2) for the ones who left, did they dislike the triage, or did they think it was great and just not want to pay for it?
Getting the answers to those would help me choose where to focus first.
I've used it every morning since June, with incredible delight in what it does for my days, so I'm still going to try to find users who find the same value that I do.
Thank you for the offer.
I'm hoping the answer to that is the same reason I built it, which is that proper task management is actually hard work. I think we like to fool ourselves into believing that if we removed this friction or that friction, we would just start the habit of managing our tasks, and only then would we get stuff done.
This app is about getting off that track, and just doing things instead. You might use it differently, but I've built it so that I only barely use the app. It's almost like a note taker, I just say the things I need to do into it, and check my email in the morning.
You have to remember that if you just slopped it out, then anyone can.
It works beautifully, and I've never felt the need for anything more complicated.
1) Bottom-up: this is the price that is sustainable given that there is a model reading your task list every morning
2) Top-down: this is priced between simple todo lists that just manage your data, and more complex AI tools that do a lot more than tasks.
Does your freemium app feature AI? Does it convert well into paying customers?
Personally, I tend to dodge phone calls, but it's true that I use this mostly with voice. Rather than having something talk back to me, I'm using a gesture and talking to it.
How often are you taking that phone call?