Is Todoist Free? What the Free Plan Actually Includes

Yes, Todoist is free, and the free plan is one of the few I would hand to someone who has never used a task manager without apologising for it first. The pricing page names no task cap. Recurring due dates, reminders, sub-tasks and natural-language entry are all in there.

The catch is one number, and it is not the one people expect: five projects. Not five hundred tasks, not five reminders a week. Five projects, and then the "new project" button stops giving you a new project.

Everything below comes off the Todoist pricing page as it read on 3 September 2026. Prices move; the link is there so you can check me.

First, the name changed

The free plan is called Beginner now, not Free. Read a review from a year or two back, then open the pricing page, and the columns will not line up. You will spend a minute wondering whether the free tier quietly disappeared. It did not. It got a different label.

The three plans today:

One note on those figures: $5 and $8 are the yearly rates, off a Monthly / Yearly toggle with a "Save 20%" badge. I did not write the month-to-month numbers down and will not reconstruct them from the discount. Flip the toggle yourself.

What Beginner keeps, which is most of the good stuff

This is why Todoist has the reputation it has. The free plan does not amputate the things you actually use every day:

• Smart Quick Add. Type call the dentist tomorrow at 2 p1 #Health and it parses the date, the time, the priority and the project out of that one line. This is the feature people stay for, and it is free.
• Task reminders, with due dates and times.
• Recurring due dates. "Every other Tuesday" keeps working forever, at $0.
• Sub-tasks, labels, priority levels, task descriptions.
• List and board layouts, 90+ integrations, productivity visualizations.

Most free tiers hold recurrence or reminders hostage. Todoist holds neither, which matters more than any single paid feature: a task app that cannot nag you on a schedule is a notes app with worse fonts.

Where it stops

Seven limits, and what each one feels like in practice:

5 personal projects. The real ceiling. More on this below.

3 filter views. A filter is a saved query: "everything due this week across all projects with priority 1". Three covers a today view, an overdue view and one project-spanning one. If you build a filter per context, you will feel this on day two.

1 week of activity history. The sneakiest limit on the list, and the one nobody notices while evaluating.

5 MB file uploads. Fine for a screenshot or a PDF invoice. Not fine for the scanned contract or the phone video of the broken boiler.

5 people per personal project. You can share a grocery list with your household. You cannot run a client project with a dozen collaborators. Note that this one is 5 on Pro too — it is the single limit on this list that paying does not lift.

4 themes. Cosmetic. Listed for completeness, not because it will change your decision.

Ramble (voice capture): limited sessions. You get to try the voice capture, you do not get to live in it.

The five-project wall, and whether you will hit it

There is no task cap named on the Beginner plan. The limit that bites is structural, and your structure decides whether Todoist free lasts a week or lasts years.

Person A keeps a project per area of life: Work, Home, Health, Money, Side Project. That is five. The sixth thing, a house move or a course or a trip, has nowhere to go, and that usually happens in the first month.

Person B keeps everything in Inbox and sorts with labels and filters. Labels are included on the free plan, with no cap printed against them. Person B may never see the wall, though the three-filter cap starts pinching instead, because filters are how you get anything back out of a flat list.

So look at how you already organise things. Folder per topic means you are Person A and you are on a clock. One big pile plus search means you are Person B, and the free plan might be the last productivity purchase you never make.

The one-week history is the one to watch

Activity history is not a feature you miss on day one. You miss it the first time you need it, and by then it is gone.

Two versions of that moment. Someone asks when a task actually got closed, a client or an accountant or your own memory arguing with itself, and the answer is older than seven days, so there is no answer. Or you deleted something a fortnight ago and want it back, and the log that would have said what it was has already rolled off the end.

Nothing warns you about this while you are evaluating the app. A new account has no history worth losing.

What $60 a year actually buys

Pro takes the ceilings out: 300 personal projects, 150 filter views, full reporting history, 100 MB uploads, 8 themes. It also adds things Beginner does not have at all: calendar layout, task duration, deadlines (separate from due dates), custom reminders, Task Assist, unlimited Ramble, auto backups.

A decision rule instead of a list:

• If the only thing biting is the five-project ceiling, do not pay yet. Collapse your projects into two or three and carry the distinctions on labels, which are free and unlimited. Give it two weeks. If the flatter structure holds, you have saved $60 a year indefinitely.
• If you want the calendar layout, or you need history, pay. Neither has a free workaround. Restructuring cannot conjure a log that was never kept, and there is no clever way to fake a calendar view out of a list.
• If you keep bouncing off the 5 MB upload limit, pay, or stop putting files in your task manager. Both are valid. Only one costs $60.

Business at $96 billed yearly per user is the team answer: shared workspace, team projects, roles and permissions, centralized billing, granular team activity logs. If you are one person reading this, it is not for you. Todoist also states SOC2 Type II certification on the page, which is usually what the person approving the invoice wants to know.

If the ceilings are the wrong shape for you, the Todoist alternatives are written up separately.

We cap storage, not structure

Short version, then you can go back to deciding about Todoist.

Our Free plan is $0 forever with no project cap: unlimited tasks, notes and routines, plus Telegram and Slack capture. Storage is the honest limit, at 10 files and 50 MB. We cap the thing that costs us money and leave your structure alone, which is the opposite trade to the five-project wall above.

AI is the other inversion. New accounts get a 7-day Solo trial with 50 AI messages a day. After that you add your own provider key — the Gemini and Groq free tiers work — and AI stays at $0 forever, because you pay the provider directly and we take 0% in between. That is the whole bring your own API key idea.

Paid is Solo at $6/mo or $59/yr for higher AI limits, unlimited voice transcription and 500 files / 2.5 GB. Teams use Multi Workspace, priced per bracket for the whole workspace rather than per seat, starting at $12/mo or $119/yr for 2–3 users.

Underneath it is a full workspace: projects, labels, sub-tasks, blockers, assignees, roles, and recurring routines that know the public holidays in 250+ countries. Where they still beat us: Todoist has had a decade to polish Quick Add and 90+ integrations, and we have not. If parsing speed on typed input is what you care most about, they are still very good at it.

Head-to-head detail is in Todoist vs Vyneron. Otherwise, try the free plan of whichever one matches how your head is already organised. Both let you export, so changing your mind later is cheap.