Hey buddy,
Every productivity app on the planet has decided to charge you forever.
Todoist. $48/year.
Things 3. $49.99 one-time but only on Mac.
TickTick. $27.99/year.
Notion. $16/month.
And for what? A list of tasks. Something humans have been writing on paper for a hundred years.
There's a version of this product that charges people once and leaves them alone. Nobody's building it seriously. That's the idea.
Why I'm Handing This To You
I actually had an AI build a version of this for me recently. Just to see what it would look like.
This is a rough idea of how it would look
Clean interface. Daily task list. Works on mobile. No subscription required. The whole thing took a few hours to put together with the right tools.
And then I thought someone could build this properly, charge $9 once, and quietly collect payments every time a new person gets frustrated with their Notion bill.
I'm not a SaaS developer. But whoever is reading this and knows how to ship a web app, this one has a real gap to fill.
The Blueprint
The product is a simple but polished to-do app. Web-based, mobile-responsive, hosted properly. Not a weekend hack, something that looks and feels like a real product.
Here's what it needs:
The core features
Daily task list with clean checkboxes. Drag to reorder. Completed tasks move to the bottom or disappear. A simple "Today" view that resets every morning. That's the main loop. Most people need nothing more than this.
The UI is the product
This is where 90% of competitors fail. Ugly apps don't get word-of-mouth. The UI needs to be calm, minimal, and genuinely nice to look at. Think Things 3 meets Linear — lots of whitespace, a clean sans-serif font, satisfying checkbox animations. The kind of app people screenshot and post because it looks so good on their home screen.
Mobile-first
This is non-negotiable. More than half of your users will try it on their phone first. It needs to feel native — fast load times, large tap targets, no pinching to zoom. A PWA (Progressive Web App) setup means users can add it to their home screen and it feels like a real app without needing App Store approval.
The one-time payment
$9. Pay once. Use forever. No subscription. No "free tier with 3 tasks." Just buy it and use it.
This is the entire pitch and it basically sells itself. Position it directly against Todoist and TickTick "the to-do app that doesn't charge you every year." The one-time model is the marketing.
Nice-to-have features for v2
Recurring tasks. A simple weekly view. Dark mode. Subtasks. These aren't needed on day one — but they're easy upgrades that justify the $9 to slightly more demanding users.
How it makes money
$9 one-time. No recurring. No upsells needed at launch.
The math is simple: 100 sales = $900. 1,000 sales = $9,000. At $9, it's an absolute impulse buy. Someone sees a tweet about it, clicks, pays, and never thinks about it again. That's the experience you're selling.
If it gets traction, you can introduce a Pro tier later — $19 one-time for team sharing, calendar sync, or integrations. But start with the base product. Keep it simple.
The viral loop
The UI does the marketing. When someone's using a beautiful to-do app and someone asks what it is, they tell them. Screenshots spread on X and LinkedIn — "finally a task app that doesn't look like it was made in 2009." The $9 price means almost no friction to convert.
You can also run a simple affiliate programme — 30% per referral, $2.70 per sale. Productivity creators and newsletter writers will promote this for pocket change.
Why Right Now
Subscription fatigue is at an all-time high.
People are actively looking for software they can pay for once. It's a real movement — see Pika, Cleanshot X, Raycast. One-time purchases are having a moment because the market got fed up.
The to-do app space specifically is crowded at the top (Todoist, Notion, Things) and empty in the middle — a clean, simple, genuinely nice product that doesn't try to be everything. That middle ground is wide open.
And the build cost is lower than ever. A solo developer or a determined vibe-coder can ship this in a weekend with the right tools.
The One Thing That Makes It Work
The UI.
Not the features. Not the integrations. Not the AI summaries or the team collaboration or the Slack sync.
The UI.
If it looks beautiful and works smoothly, people will pay $9 without a second thought. If it looks like a Bootstrap template, they'll close the tab.
Spend 80% of your time on how it looks and feels. The features are an afterthought until the design is right.
Go Build It
Use Next.js or a similar framework for the web app. Vercel for hosting — free tier handles early traffic easily. Lemon Squeezy or Gumroad for the $9 one-time payment. Supabase for the database if you want accounts and sync.
Total cost to launch: under $20/month. Probably less.
Start with the daily list view. Make it beautiful. Ship it. See if people pay.
Go.
Talk soon, Kris
P.S. — The best micro-SaaS products do one thing so well that you'd feel weird switching. A great to-do app is that. People use it every morning. That's the most valuable real estate in someone's phone.
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