I used Todoist for just over three years. At some point it became part of my identity as a developer — a well-organized, systematically productive person with color-coded projects, properly labeled tasks, and a karma score I was quietly proud of. Then, in December 2025, Todoist raised their prices. And instead of just paying, I spent a weekend asking myself: do I actually need all of this?

Spoiler: I switched. This is what happened.

Why did I start questioning Todoist?

Subscription fatigue is real, and it crept up on me slowly. Todoist was running me $48 a year — not a lot in isolation, but I was already paying for Notion, 1Password, Raycast Pro, and a handful of others. When Todoist bumped their prices in December 2025, it didn't feel like a betrayal exactly, but it did feel like a nudge. I sat there looking at the renewal prompt and thought: I'm paying $48 a year for a to-do list. Not a project management suite, not a team collaboration tool — a personal to-do list.

That thought was enough to make me at least look around. And "look around" for me meant reconsidering what was already sitting on every device I owned.

What was my Todoist setup like?

Fair to say I was in deep. I had projects for work and personal life, with sub-projects for active clients and ongoing side projects. I used labels for context: @mac for things that required my laptop, @phone for things I could knock out while waiting somewhere, @deep-work for tasks that needed more than 25 minutes of concentration. Recurring tasks were set up for weekly reviews, monthly bills, and daily habits. I'd also wired in a Slack integration and had Todoist pulling in calendar events so I could see my schedule alongside my task list.

It worked really well, honestly. The question wasn't whether it worked — it was whether I needed all of it, or whether I'd just built complexity because it was available.

What made me try Apple Reminders again?

A friend who's also a developer mentioned he'd quietly moved back to Apple Reminders a few months earlier. He said two things that stuck with me. First: "Smart Lists are actually good now." Second: "I stopped paying for three apps I didn't need."

He walked me through his setup — Smart Lists filtered by tags and priority, natural language input through Siri on his watch, and location-based reminders that fired when he got to the grocery store. I'd last used Apple Reminders seriously back in iOS 14 when it was genuinely limited. I hadn't kept up with how much it had evolved.

I decided to try it for a weekend. If it fell apart, I'd go back and just pay Todoist.

What surprised me about Apple Reminders?

Location reminders are shockingly good, and I'd been sleeping on them entirely. I set one up to remind me to pick up a prescription when I'm near the pharmacy — not at a specific time, just when I'm physically close. Todoist technically has location reminders, but only on the paid tier, and they always felt slightly janky compared to how Apple handles it. On iPhone, location triggers are native and reliable in a way that third-party apps just can't match.

iCloud sync is also genuinely instant. I add something on my iPhone and it's on my Mac before I've even switched windows. With Todoist I occasionally noticed small delays, nothing catastrophic, but enough to make me double-check. With Reminders, I've never thought about sync once.

The Siri integration is tighter than I expected. "Remind me about this when I get home" works from anywhere in iOS. "Add milk to my Groceries list" goes exactly where it should. And because Reminders is a first-party app, Apple Intelligence on my iPhone has started surfacing relevant reminders proactively in ways that feel genuinely useful rather than intrusive.

Then there's the privacy angle. Todoist's tasks live on their servers. Apple Reminders are stored in iCloud, encrypted, and never used to train anything. As someone who sometimes puts work-related tasks in my to-do list, that matters to me more than I'd acknowledged.

What do I miss from Todoist?

I'm going to be honest here because I think a lot of these "I switched" posts gloss over the real tradeoffs.

Natural language parsing. Todoist's is better. Typing "call dentist every first Monday of the month at 9am" just works in Todoist. Apple Reminders handles most common recurrences fine, but complex patterns require tapping through menus.

Collaboration. If you share tasks with anyone — a partner, a roommate, a colleague — Apple Reminders works fine for simple shared lists. But Todoist's collaborative features (task comments, assignment, activity history) are in a different league. For a solo workflow like mine, this doesn't matter. But if you work in any kind of team context, it would.

Filters and views. Todoist's filter system is genuinely powerful. You can build queries like "tasks due before next Monday, labeled @deep-work, not in project Personal" and save them as views. Smart Lists in Apple Reminders are improving, but they're not at that level yet.

The karma system. I know this sounds trivial, but the Todoist karma score and streak system actually motivated me. Seeing a streak of productive days in a row made me less likely to procrastinate. Apple Reminders has no equivalent. Some people will see this as a feature; I genuinely miss it.

Web access. Todoist has a great web app that works from any browser. Apple Reminders is Apple ecosystem only. If you ever need to check your tasks from a Windows machine or a borrowed laptop, you're out of luck.

What's my workflow now?

After a few weeks of iteration, I've landed on something that feels sustainable. My Smart Lists do most of the organizational heavy lifting — and if you want to take it further, you can build a full GTD system with Apple Reminders:

For context, I use tags: #work, #personal, #errands, #waiting (for things blocked on someone else), and #someday for ideas I'm not ready to commit to. It's a lighter version of what I had in Todoist, but it covers 90% of the same ground.

Siri handles quick captures throughout the day. If I'm in the middle of something and don't want to break flow, I say it out loud and deal with the inbox later. Shortcuts takes care of a few recurring workflows — a morning routine checklist that populates automatically on weekday mornings, and an end-of-week review reminder that opens Reminders directly to my Flagged list.

How did I migrate from Todoist to Apple Reminders?

Honestly, this was easier than I expected and took about 30 minutes. Todoist lets you export your data as a CSV from Settings. I opened it, went through my active tasks, and asked myself a genuinely useful question for each one: does this task still matter?

About a third of them were stale — things I'd been carrying forward out of inertia rather than intention. I deleted those without guilt. The rest I manually entered into Apple Reminders, which forced me to think about where each one actually belonged rather than just doing a mechanical copy-paste. I created a handful of lists matching my old Todoist project structure, set up my Smart Lists, and was done.

The friction of manual migration turned out to be useful. A clean setup felt better than a cluttered one ported wholesale from the old system.

Would I recommend the switch?

If you're living primarily in the Apple ecosystem and you don't need collaboration features, yes. The privacy, the tight system integration, the instant sync across devices, and especially the location reminders make a compelling case. Add to that the $48 a year you stop paying, and the math is pretty clear.

If you regularly need to access your tasks from non-Apple devices, or if you collaborate on tasks with other people, or if you're a genuine power user who relies on advanced filters — stay on Todoist. It's a better product for those specific needs, and the price is reasonable for what you get.

For me, the Apple ecosystem lock-in isn't really a lock-in because I have no intention of leaving. And the simplicity of not managing a subscription, not worrying about whether my data is being used for something, and just having tasks work exactly the way the OS expects them to — that's been worth more than I anticipated.

The best to-do app is the one you actually use. I was using Todoist because I'd invested in setting it up. That's not the same thing.

How Side Reminder changed my workflow

Here's the thing I didn't expect: switching to Apple Reminders meant I had to make it feel as fast as Todoist. Todoist has quick-add shortcuts that are genuinely good. The default Apple Reminders experience requires opening the app, picking a list, tapping the add button — too many steps to become a reflex.

I found Side Reminder about two weeks into my switch, and it's been the piece that made everything click. It lives at the edge of my screen — I move my cursor to the right side and my reminders are there, in a panel that doesn't steal focus from whatever I'm working on. I can see my today list, add a task with a keyboard shortcut, and close it in under five seconds without leaving my current app. The voice capture means I can add something without typing at all on days when I'm deep in code and don't want to break the mental thread. And the built-in focus timer pairs naturally with my #deep-work Smart List — I pull up the tasks, start a timer, and have one clean workspace for the session.

Apple Reminders, on its own, has a friction problem for power users. Side Reminder solves that friction. The two together feel like what Todoist was trying to be — minus the subscription, minus the overhead.

Conclusion

I started this experiment skeptically and ended up staying permanently. Apple Reminders is not Todoist, and it's not trying to be. It's simpler, more private, more tightly woven into the OS, and free. For the way I work — solo, Mac-primary, Apple ecosystem throughout — it's the right tool.

The lesson I took from this isn't really about task apps. It's that complexity I'd added over years wasn't making me more productive; it was something I managed alongside my actual work. Stripping it back to something simpler gave me one less thing to think about. That's worth $48 a year on its own.