Todoist price increase: the alternative question for freelancers

Lars opens the email between two retainer calls. His to-do app's Pro tier renews next week, and the price is higher again. Not dramatically. A few euros. But it's the third small bump in a year, and stacked together it feels like a 40% rise for a tool he uses to do one thing: look at today's list every morning. He's a freelance back-end developer. Two clients. He used the AI features twice in six months.

That email isn't an annoyance. On a quiet invoicing month it's a budget line, and it forces a decision he didn't ask to make.

Why did your to-do app's price go up?

The honest answer is unglamorous. Premium to-do apps are competing on features now. AI assistants, generated subtasks, smart scheduling, integrations with everything. Each new tier costs money to build and run, especially the AI parts. So the price goes up to fund the roadmap.

That logic holds for a product team. It doesn't hold for Lars. He's paying a share of a feature factory he never visits. The app raised its price for the average of all its users, and the average user is not a solo freelancer who opens one screen a day.

What does a freelancer actually need from a task app?

Strip it back. The job is knowing what you can realistically finish today against the hours you actually have. Not collaboration. Not automation chains. Not an agent that drafts your tasks for you.

Noor is a brand designer working project to project. She built a templating system inside her old app once, two years ago, and never touched it again. She's paying a rising premium to keep that system alive in case she needs it. She doesn't need it. She needs to know what fits in Tuesday.

Roos juggles four small copywriting clients. Her real problem isn't capturing tasks. It's overcommitting. She says yes on Monday to things that don't fit by Wednesday, and a flat list never told her the day was already full. No to-do app, at any price, solved that for her, because a list has no concept of "full."

That's the actual need. A planner that pushes back when today doesn't add up.

The hidden cost of feature bloat on a solo plan

When you're solo, you pay the new price for the whole stack while using a sliver of it. The math is quiet but it compounds. And the worse part isn't the euros. It's that the "is this still worth it" question now arrives every billing cycle. You renegotiate with yourself monthly. That's a small recurring tax on attention you'd rather spend on client work.

Tom, a freelance bookkeeper, feels this most in tax season. During his busiest weeks he can least afford a surprise. A price hike that lands in March isn't a feature decision for him. It's a variable cost he refuses to carry into a crunch. He wants the number to be the number.

What flat pricing actually removes

A fixed structure removes the recurring renegotiation. TaskBerry is free to start, and Pro is EUR 4.95 a month. That's it. No usage tiers that creep, no roadmap surcharge, no annual letter explaining why it costs more now.

The point isn't that EUR 4.95 is cheap. The point is that it's predictable, and it's attached to the one feature you open daily rather than the forty you don't. If you want to see what a predictable monthly cost actually looks like, the pricing page is short on purpose.

That predictability is the product for Tom as much as the planning is for Roos.

How to switch without losing your system

Switching tools sounds heavier than it is, mostly because the old app trained you to think your "system" lives inside it. Usually it doesn't. Usually it's a few projects and a habit.

Practical version:

• Export your active tasks and deadlines. Most apps offer a CSV or JSON export from settings. You only need the things that are still alive, not three years of completed history.
• Drop the structure you set up once and never used. Noor's templates, the nested project trees, the labels you stopped applying in month two. If you haven't touched it in 90 days, it isn't your system. It's furniture.
• Bring across only what has a date or a deadline. Backlog items can go in plain text for a week while you settle in.
• Rebuild the daily habit deliberately, not the archive. The win is opening the new planner each morning, not migrating the past.

A lighter planner is easier to move to precisely because there's less to move. That cuts both ways, and it's worth saying plainly.

Is a focused planner enough for you?

Here's where honesty matters more than the pitch.

TaskBerry is a single-user day planner. There is no team collaboration, no shared projects, no task assignment. If your work involves coordinating other people inside the app, this is genuinely not your tool, and no price comparison changes that.

There's also no deep automation engine and no integration marketplace. If most of the value you got from the old app came from heavy automations or a web of connected services, switching means rebuilding that elsewhere or letting it go. For some people that trade isn't worth it. That's a fair conclusion to reach.

A feature-rich app is the right call when the features are load-bearing in your week. It's the wrong call when you're funding a platform to use a checklist. Most freelancers I've talked to are in the second group and haven't said it out loud yet, partly because of the sunk-cost effect: the longer you've paid for something, the harder it is to admit you've outgrown it, even when the monthly invoice keeps nudging the question.

If that's you, the next step is small. Plan one real day. Put in the actual work you have this week and let the planner tell you where it stops fitting. You can plan a day that fits the hours you actually have before you decide anything about the old subscription. Cancel nothing yet. Just see whether the quiet version is enough. For a lot of people it is, and the renewal email gets a lot less interesting after that.