Is Todoist free?

Yes, for up to five projects, with no time limit and no card. Todoist is the rare subject that publishes its entire price list in public and in detail. That covers every tier, both billing periods, thirteen currencies, and a feature-by-feature comparison table. So for once the number is not missing. Three other things are. Neither store prints a figure. The pricing page and the help center disagree about one limit. And the rule that decides whether the free tier works for you, what happens to your sixth project, is not on the pricing page at all.

Every price Todoist publishes

All of these were read on 15 September 2026, in the US, signed out, with prices set to USD and without an account.

Derived: twelve months of Pro at $7 is $84 against $60 billed yearly, so the annual plan saves $24, about 29%. Twelve months of Business at $10 is $120 against $96, saving the same $24, which is exactly 20%. The toggle on the pricing page is badged Save 20% and sits above both columns, so it is precise for Business and understates Pro by roughly nine points. Todoist is underselling its own discount. It’s the first error in the reader’s favor we have turned up. The “plus local tax” note appears on Business and not on Pro.

What the two stores print, corrected

This section originally said neither store prints a number. Apple does, and we found the error on 19 September 2026 while writing about Sweatcoin, where the same mistake runs through most of this section.

Apple’s product page says Free · In-App Purchases under the title. The In-App Purchases row in the Information block reads Yes, with a chevron that expands into a price list. Todoist’s has four entries: Todoist Pro Monthly $6.99, Todoist Pro Yearly $59.99, and a Legacy pair at the same two figures. Todoist hasn’t filled in the promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel. That’s the separate optional slot where Fruit Ninja advertises a $9.99 theme.

Four entries is unusually few; most listings here hit Apple’s ten-item cap. They are App Store price points for the plan the website sells at $7 a month or $60 a year. The two surfaces agree to within a penny.

Google Play shows an In-app purchases badge with no amount beside it. We checked the optional section below the description under both of the headings it uses: In-app items and offers on an app and In-game items and offers on a game. Searching for only one of them made us publish a wrong claim once. Neither is present on Todoist. The page runs from the description straight to Data safety.

So on Play the only dollar figures anywhere are inside customer reviews. On Apple the only one in the body of the page is a 2020 review calling “$38 a year” a bargain. One on Play says “$60/year has become way too much”. The second happens to match the current price and the first doesn’t. You can’t tell which is current without checking the company, and by then you don’t need the review. The Information row is the better source, two clicks from where anyone reads.

One limit, two different answers, both from Doist

Todoist’s pricing page and its billing FAQ disagree about how large a file Pro lets you attach. Both were read on 15 September 2026; the FAQ article records its own last update as 28 August 2026.

We can’t tell which is right. The page selling the subscription quotes the larger number, which matters if you are choosing Pro to attach something specific. If a 40 MB attachment is the reason you are upgrading, ask support before you pay. Everything else in the two tables agrees.

What the free tier caps

Beginner caps how much you can keep, and leaves most features alone. Most free tiers are less friendly than that.

• Five active personal projects, and five active team projects. Archiving one frees a slot, because the cap counts active projects.
• Three custom filter views, against 150 on Pro.
• Seven days of activity history, against full history on Pro.
• 5 MB file uploads, against 25 or 100 — see above.
• No automatic backups, and no way to make one manually.

What Beginner keeps is the surprise. Due dates and times, recurring dates, priorities, sub-tasks, sub-projects, sections, labels, task reminders, comments and assigned tasks are all free, and so are the list and board layouts. The calendar layout, task durations, time-blocking and deadlines are the Pro features a free user will notice missing.

One number does not move at all: five people per personal project on every tier, Beginner, Pro and Business alike. Paying does not buy you more collaborators on a personal project; it buys a team workspace instead.

What happens to project six

The pricing page leaves this out, and it decides what a lapsed subscription costs you, so read it before you subscribe. Todoist documents it fully, in a separate article.

Nothing is deleted. Projects above the five-project limit become view-only — readable, deletable, archivable, but not editable and not open to new tasks. They are marked with an exclamation mark in the sidebar and a banner inside the project. You get full access back either by subscribing again or by archiving and deleting until you are under the limit. Custom filters over the limit keep their data but their contents cannot be viewed until you upgrade. In Todoist’s words, “all your task-related data will be retained”.

The catch is which five survive. You don’t choose. The article says so in one word, “No”, and Todoist picks “according to the creation date”. Its own worked example: a Pro account with ten personal projects downgrading to Beginner will find that “your 5 oldest projects will become view-only”. The five you keep editing are the five you made most recently. If the project you have maintained for four years is the one you care about, that is the one that freezes.

Team projects over the limit are called frozen instead of view-only, with the same read-only behavior. Todoist documents an escape hatch: move a frozen team project into My Projects and it becomes editable again.

What Todoist does better

Most of this page is about where a number lives. On the things we usually criticize, though, Todoist is at or near the top of every app we have examined.

• It publishes the whole price list, unprompted. Three tiers, both billing periods, thirteen currencies, and a comparison table running to dozens of rows. Rocket Money would not name a single figure across four surfaces. Todoist names all of them on the first page you land on.
• It documents the downgrade in detail. A dedicated article, a worked example with real numbers, and a plain “No” to the question of whether you can choose. Plenty of subscription apps leave you to discover this by losing access.
• It says out loud what it will not do. No family sharing, no Apple Family Sharing, no Google Play Family Library, monthly plans non-refundable, and the cancellation tab missing from the mobile app. Todoist could have left out any of those.
• Its two stores agree about data. Nothing under Apple’s tracking heading, “No data shared with third parties” on Google’s. Compare PAC-MAN 256, whose two declarations contradict each other outright.
• The free tier has no countdown. No trial clock on Beginner, no card, no feature that stops working after a fortnight.

What we could not check

• Anything behind a login. We did not create an account, so the in-app price, the cancellation flow and the view-only banner are described from Todoist’s documentation rather than from a screen we saw. Whether the in-app price matches the web price is the open question, and it is the same one the Calm page left open.
• Which file upload figure is current. Two Doist surfaces, two numbers, and no third document that settles it.
• Non-US pricing. The pricing page offers thirteen currencies and the billing FAQ links separate articles for each; we read USD only and every figure here is the US one.

How to check any of this yourself

Start on the pricing page, but change the toggle. It opens on Yearly, so the price you see first is the discounted one. The monthly rate, the number that matters if you aren’t ready to commit, takes a click to reach. It isn’t hidden, but $5 and $7 are different decisions, and the default shows you $5.

Then read the help center, not the store. Here the trials are on both listings, but the limits, the refund policy, the cancellation route and the downgrade rule are help articles. The billing FAQ links every one of them from a single page. And when the marketing page and the documentation give the same limit two different values, believe neither until somebody at the company tells you which. We ended up doing the same on the ChatGPT page, and Todoist is otherwise unusually forthcoming.