People Will Pay $30 For Great To-Do Lists
We’ll have a Superhuman for every category of productivity tools
5 years ago, if you asked anyone in the productivity space if people would pay $30 per month for an email application, there would have been outrage.
Paying over $30 yearly for a tool is considered enough, but the market has shifted. Tools like Superhuman, a powerful, fast and command-based email application, has gained attention from hundreds of thousands worldwide for being smooth and beautiful to look at, sending thousands to throw their credit cards at the screen.
But will this same model work for calendars, note-taking tools, and even to-do list applications? Will we pay for a $30 a month to-do list application?
🍰 What would it need to have?
So, for a to-do list application, it would have to be pretty special.
Tools like Things 3, Todoist and TickTick are the kings of the market right now and do a fabulous job already, so it’d have to greatly surpass them in the following:
- 🏎 Speed — snappy and fast on all devices
- 👩🏻💻 Community — a cult-like community around the tool
- 🤖 Machine Learning — a key component to taking it to the next level
With these categories in mind, the following features would make hit a $30 per month price point:
- 💙 Interface — design would need to be classic and outdo Cultured Code’s Things 3 clean look
- ⚡️ Lightning Speed — integrations and native tools would need to be snappy and easy to access on all devices
- ⏱ Contextual — this tool would have to learn about you each time you completed a new task — eg. how long it took to complete certain tasks
- ✨ Community Learning — Tiago Forte shared a wonderful tweet about a tool that would learn from its community and build better personal experiences, this tool would have to do that
💵 Who would pay?
There’s a segment of users that I believe would be open to paying for this sort of tool, as long as there was enough argument to subside other tools.
Most commonly, these could be:
- Executives
- Business Customers
- Hardcore productivity tool fans
💼 Why this trend towards premium tools?
There’s room for a premium tool in the market, with a warranted community behind it, and if it had the following criteria, people would buy into it:
- Things 3’s design
- Todoist’s reliability
- IBM’s Watson-style AI/machine learning
- Taskade’s playfulness
- Superhuman’s cult
💻 Who will do this?
There are some tools like Sunsama, Focuster, Amazin Marvin that I believe are best positioned to something like this. But only time will tell.
There’s a good chance that tools like Things 3 would, in their Things 4 edition, go to a per $ month pricing to help support their business model but the $30 per month price tag would be a little off.
But I do see a new competitor joining and entering with a $20-$30 per month to-do list application, that is adored by the community. Let’s see!
