Why I built TodoBar

I built TodoBar because nothing I tried was the right shape.

I have used basically every Mac todo app over the last fifteen years. Things 3 was beautiful and felt like a real Mac app, but it lived in a window that wanted to be open and considered, and I am not the kind of person who plans my life in a window. Reminders.app was right there in the system, but its menu bar presence was clumsy and its design always felt like an iOS app squeezed onto a Mac. Notion and Asana were obviously the wrong category. Apple Notes was always somehow the place I ended up writing actual todos because it was the easiest text input on the machine, but then nothing reminded me about them.

The shape I wanted was very specific. A menu bar app, because the menu bar is where the things I check several times an hour live. A popover, because the popover dismisses itself when I am done with it and I do not have to think about closing a window. A global hotkey for adding tasks, because the worst part of any todo system is the friction of writing the task down. And smart enough about dates that I could type “Email Sam tomorrow at 9am” and not have to fill out a form.

That app did not exist in the form I wanted. So I built it.

What it is

TodoBar is a tiny menu bar todo list for macOS. The whole app is a popover that lives in your menu bar. Pressing a global hotkey from any app opens a Quick Add panel where you type a task and press Return. The app reads natural English and figures out the due date. It syncs across your Macs through your private iCloud account. It remembers your stats so you can see your week’s worth of completed tasks if that is the kind of thing you like. There is a small frog mascot named Tad who quietly cheers you on.

That is the whole product. Nothing about projects, nothing about teams, nothing about clients or invoicing. It is the personal list, in the menu bar, where it belongs.

What it is not

I get this question by email from time to time, so the short version: TodoBar is not trying to grow into a project management tool. There will not be a Pro tier with kanban boards. There will not be shared lists with other users. There will not be an iPhone app, at least not as the same product, because the iPhone has different ergonomics and pretending otherwise produces a worse Mac app.

I wrote a longer post called the case for tiny single-purpose Mac apps that explains why this matters, but the short version is: every Mac power user already has a folder full of tiny utilities they trust because those utilities have refused to grow. I would like TodoBar to keep that promise.

Why it makes sense as a one-person project in 2026

The conventional wisdom for a long time was that an indie Mac app could not survive without a subscription. I do not believe that is still true, for three reasons:

1. The Mac App Store handles distribution and updates. There are no servers to run and no marketing channel to fund. The marginal cost of one more user is essentially zero.
2. Apple shipped the on-device Foundation Models framework in macOS 26, which means I can ship AI features without a per-user inference bill. The whole reason indie apps moved to subscriptions a few years ago was the cost of cloud LLM calls. That cost is now zero for the kind of work TodoBar does. I wrote about what this actually means in another post.
3. There is a real audience of customers who actively prefer to pay once and own the software. Subscription fatigue is a thing. People remember when they bought BBEdit and used it for ten years.

The math works. A one-time $9.99 unlock, a healthy free tier, and a small steady stream of customers who like a focused tool is enough to fund the time it takes to keep the app good.

What I will not do

A few promises that matter:

• TodoBar will never have analytics or third-party tracking. I do not want to know how often you open it. I do not need to know.
• TodoBar will never use a TodoBar account. There is no TodoBar account. iCloud or local, that is it.
• TodoBar will never ship a feature whose only purpose is to justify a subscription.
• TodoBar will never sell your data. There is no data to sell. Your tasks live on your Mac.
• TodoBar will not silently change pricing on existing customers. The unlock is a one-time purchase. Future customers may pay a different price; you will not.

These are not policies that need a lawyer to maintain. They are choices that follow from the architecture. There is no server, so there is no analytics. There is no account, so there is no tracking. There is no recurring revenue, so there is no quarterly pressure to add features that make the app worse.

What you can do

If TodoBar sounds like the shape of a tool you have been wanting, it is on the Mac App Store as a free download. The free tier is up to 10 active tasks, which is enough for most personal use. The one-time $9.99 unlock removes the cap. Both tiers get every feature.

If you have feedback, an idea, or a bug, email support@todobar.app. There is one developer here. I read every message.

Thanks for reading. There is a small frog who would like to remind you to email Sam.