Todoist pricing: what it really costs per year (2026)

TL;DR

• Todoist starts at $5.00/month on its Pro (monthly) plan — $60 a year, $180 over three years for a single seat.
• That puts it in the 9th percentile of the 32 tool prices we track: 29 tracked tools cost more per month, the rest cost less.
• Against the median productivity tool we track ($12.00/month), Todoist is 58% cheaper.
• The median lifetime deal we currently track costs $29.99 — the equivalent of 6 months of Todoist.
• Todoist has a free tier, so for low-volume use the honest comparison is free versus one-time, not subscription versus one-time.

Total spend on Todoist, year by year

At $5.00 a month, Todoist sits low enough that the annual figure rarely triggers a procurement conversation — which is precisely why its lifetime total goes unexamined. Five years of a small recurring charge is $300, and nobody signs off on that number because nobody ever sees it written down. Todoist charges less per month when the Pro plan is billed annually.

Time on Todoist	Cumulative cost (1 seat)	Cumulative cost (5 seats)	Break-even one-time price
1 year	$60	$300	Under $60
2 years	$120	$600	Under $120
3 years	$180	$900	Under $180
5 years	$300	$1,500	Under $300
10 years	$600	$3,000	Under $600

Treat those break-even prices as the maximum a perpetual alternative could rationally cost, not as a target. Discount them heavily for any tool whose roadmap, funding or ownership you cannot see.

What happens when the team grows

Even at a low unit price, seat multiplication is what turns Todoist into a line item worth reviewing. Assuming linear per-seat pricing on the Pro (monthly) plan:

Seats	Monthly	Annual	Three-year total
1	$5.00	$60	$180
3	$15.00	$180	$540
5	$25.00	$300	$900
10	$50.00	$600	$1,800
25	$125.00	$1,500	$4,500

Real invoices deviate from linear at both ends — volume tiers and annual commitments compress the top, and a free tier can absorb the first seat entirely at the bottom. Treat this as the ceiling estimate.

How Todoist prices against the market

We hold published entry prices for 32 software tools, which lets us place Todoist on a distribution instead of calling it affordable or premium with nothing behind the word. Todoist sits at the 9th percentile. The median tracked tool costs $14.00 per month. Todoist is among the cheapest tools we price — 29 of the 32 we track cost more per month.

The tracked tools priced closest to Todoist are Trello at $5.00/month, Elementor at $4.92/month, Buffer at $6.00/month. If any of those already sit in your stack, the overlap question comes before the pricing question: two tools at this price point cost $120 a year together, and consolidation is usually the larger saving than any discount on either one.

Todoist is a personal and small-team task manager known for natural-language capture and a generous free tier.

Against its own category

Comparing across all software is a blunt instrument, so we also hold the 1 other productivity tool we price. Their median entry price is $12.00 per month, which puts Todoist 58% below it. Undercutting a category by that margin usually signals either a narrower feature set or a deliberate land-grab on price. Both are fine reasons to buy; they are different reasons to expect price rises later.

productivity tool	Entry price / month	Vs Todoist
Notion	$12.00	140% more

What the free tier is worth

Because Todoist keeps a permanent free plan, the $60 annual figure is not the price of the software — it is the price of whichever ceiling the free plan imposes on you. Identify that ceiling before you value anything else. List the caps in order of how often you hit them. If the top one is something you meet twice a year, the paid tier is insurance rather than infrastructure.

A practical test: run the free plan deliberately for a full billing cycle and record every moment it blocks you. If that list is short, the $180 three-year figure is buying convenience rather than capability.

What perpetual licences cost right now

Todoist has run promotional discounts but no marketplace lifetime deal on the platforms we track. These are the cheapest one-time-payment tools our crawler currently observes across the marketplaces we track, each converted into the number of Todoist months it equals.

Tracked one-time deal	Category	Marketplace	Lowest observed price	Months of Todoist it equals
Email List Validation	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
ProductDyno	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
The Personal Goals Freebie Bundle	Online Courses	StackSocial	$0.00	0
Shopper.com	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
Helium 10	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
Vumu	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0

The conversion column is the point of this table. A perpetual licence is not "cheap" in the abstract — it is a fixed number of subscription months, and it repays only if the tool outlives them.

Does Todoist itself have a lifetime deal?

The live answer, with the list of marketplaces checked and the date they were checked, sits on its own page. See Does Todoist have a lifetime deal? The page updates automatically if that changes.

How this page is maintained

Pricing comes from Todoist's own published pricing page and is re-checked each review cycle; the comparison distribution is recomputed from our first-party tracker on every run. Last computed 2026-09-20.