Is Todoist free?

Yes, for up to five projects, with no time limit and no card. Todoist is the rare subject in this format that publishes its entire price list in public and in detail — every tier, both billing periods, thirteen currencies, and a feature-by-feature comparison table — so the usual finding, that the number is missing, does not apply. What is missing is something else. Neither store prints a figure. The pricing page and the help center disagree about one limit. And the rule that actually decides whether the free tier works for you is not on the pricing page at all: it is what happens to your sixth project.

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. That is a company underselling its own discount, and it is the first error in the reader’s favor this format has turned up. The “plus local tax” note appears on Business and not on Pro.

The two stores print no number at all

This is the finding that repeats on nearly every page in this format, and Todoist is a cleaner case than most because there is a published price to compare the silence against.

Apple’s product page says Free · In-App Purchases under the title and carries an In-App Purchases row in the Information block whose value is the single word Yes. There is no promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel — the optional slot where Fruit Ninja advertises a $9.99 theme — so Apple publishes no figure.

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 — because searching for only one of them made this site publish a wrong claim once. Neither is present on Todoist. The page runs from the description straight to Data safety.

So on both listings the only dollar figure anywhere is inside a customer review: a 2020 review on Apple calling “$38 a year” a bargain, and one on Play saying “$60/year has become way too much”. The second happens to match the current price and the first does not, which is the whole argument for never taking a number out of a review — you cannot tell which is which without checking the company, and by then you did not need the review.

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 are not going to guess which is right, and neither should you: the page selling the subscription is the one quoting the larger number, which is the direction that would matter if you were 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 actually caps

Beginner is limited by capacity rather than by features, which is a friendlier shape than most free tiers and worth saying clearly.

• 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 part that surprises: due dates and times, recurring dates, priorities, sub-tasks, sub-projects, sections, labels, task reminders, comments, assigned tasks, and both the list and board layouts. The calendar layout, task durations, time-blocking and deadlines are the Pro features a free user actually notices 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

This is the mechanic the pricing page does not carry and the one most worth knowing before you subscribe, because it governs what a lapsed subscription costs you. 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 part that is genuinely counter-intuitive is which five survive. You do not 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 work the other way round in name only: above the limit they become frozen rather than view-only, with the same read-only behavior, and 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, so it would leave a false impression to stop there. On the things this site normally criticizes, Todoist is at or near the top of everything 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. Every one of those is a sentence a company could have left out.
• 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 is not a countdown. No trial clock on Beginner, no card, no feature that stops working after a fortnight. It is capped, not timed.

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 and the monthly rate — the number that matters if you are not ready to commit — takes a click to reach. That is not hidden, but it is the default, and $5 and $7 are different decisions.

Then read the help center rather than the store. On this company the trials are on both listings, but the limits, the refund policy, the cancellation route and the downgrade rule are all help articles, and 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 — the habit the ChatGPT page arrived at, applied to a company that is otherwise unusually forthcoming.