You found Sunsama somewhere around the point where your task list had gone feral. The trial felt like someone had finally built software that understood mornings: pull today’s work into one calm column, guess how long each thing takes, drop the guesses onto a calendar, then close the day with a short review. For two weeks you planned like a person with a whole life together.
Then the trial ended. The price was around $20 a month at the time of writing, you did the arithmetic for a year, and you closed the tab with a very specific kind of grief.
Here’s the annoying part, which is also the freeing part: the app wasn’t doing the work. The ritual was. And the ritual is free.
What is Sunsama actually doing for an ADHD brain?
Take the nice typography away and Sunsama runs five moves in a fixed order. It pulls tasks in from your other tools so there’s only one place to look. It makes you choose a small number of them for today. It asks how long each will take. It drops them into calendar slots. It ends the day with a shutdown review, where whatever didn’t happen moves to tomorrow.
None of those moves are clever on their own. What you were paying for is that they happen in the same order, in the same place, every day, without you having to remember they exist. That is the exact thing an ADHD brain has the hardest time building alone: routine formation depends on automatization, motivation and executive function — the three resources in shortest supply on the mornings you most need a plan.
The estimate step is quietly the most valuable one, and it’s the first one people drop. Guessing “twenty minutes” and watching it take ninety isn’t a failure, it’s data. Doing it daily is one of the few things that slowly recalibrates a brain that reads time differently than the clock does.
And writing the day down at all isn’t admin overhead. Cognitive offloading improves performance on the task you’re actually doing, because your working memory stops paying rent on a list it was never built to hold.
Which parts of the ritual do you actually need?
Probably not all five. Rebuilding Sunsama move for move with free tools is how people end up with a planning system that takes forty minutes and gets quietly abandoned by Thursday.
So find the specific breakage first. If your day dissolves because you never decided what today was, you need the pick-a-small-number step and nothing else yet. If you decide fine and then the time evaporates, you need estimates and calendar slots. If you end most days convinced you did nothing, you need the shutdown review — two minutes, out loud if that helps, just naming what actually moved.
Pick one. Add the second only after the first has survived two weeks.
Free Sunsama alternatives worth trying
Nothing below is a like-for-like clone, because the polish is genuinely what Sunsama charges for. What they do is cover one or two of the five moves well enough that you stop paying for all five. If renting your to-do list is the part that stings, there’s a longer list of to-do apps with no subscription worth reading alongside this.
| App | Cost | Ads | Account needed | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunsama | ~$20/mo at the time of writing | No | Yes | The price is the whole problem |
| Super Productivity | Free, open source | No | No | Dense interface; desktop is stronger than mobile |
| Morgen | Free tier | No | Yes | Free plan caps connected accounts and integrations |
| Google Calendar + Tasks | Free | No | Google account | No estimates, no review — you run those yourself |
| TickTick | Free tier | No | Yes | Calendar view sits behind Premium at the time of writing |
| Noodl | Free | No | No | Android only; no calendar sync, no time estimates |
Super Productivity — the closest free version of plan, estimate, track
This is the one to try first if you loved the whole loop and not just the look. It’s open source and free, it runs on Android and desktop, and it does the three moves most free apps skip: you set today’s list, you put a time estimate on each task, and a timer tracks what the task really took. At the end of the day you get a summary of the gap between the two, which is the shutdown review in everything but name. Sync is optional and goes through storage you already own, so there’s no account to make.
The honest catch is that it looks like a tool, not a spa. Where Sunsama gives you white space, this gives you buttons. If a cluttered screen is the thing that makes you close an app, start somewhere else.
Best for: people who want the estimate-versus-actual feedback loop and don’t need it to be beautiful.
Morgen — calendar and tasks on one timeline
Morgen’s pitch is close to Sunsama’s: your calendars and your task apps in a single day view, with tasks you drag into real time slots. There’s a free tier at the time of writing, which is the reason it’s here. Check the current limits before you commit your whole system to it, because the free plan caps how many calendar accounts and task integrations you can connect, and the deeper planning features sit on the paid tiers.
It’s strongest if your tasks already live somewhere else and the missing piece is seeing them against your actual day.
Best for: people whose calendar is full and whose tasks are scattered across two or three apps.
Google Calendar + Google Tasks — timeboxing with what’s already on your phone
Unglamorous and completely free. Tasks show up inside Google Calendar, so you can drop one onto a 2pm slot and it behaves like an appointment with yourself. On most Android phones both apps are already installed, which removes the setup step that kills a lot of new systems.
What you don’t get is any of the ritual. There’s no prompt to estimate, no end-of-day review, nothing that asks you to keep today small. You have to supply that yourself, which works fine for some people and not at all for others. A recurring calendar event called “plan tomorrow” at 4:45pm does more than it sounds like it should.
Best for: people who already live in Google Calendar and only need the timeboxing half.
TickTick — a free daily list with a timer attached
TickTick’s free tier covers lists, due dates, widgets and a built-in Pomodoro timer, which makes it a decent single home for “what’s today” plus “start the thing”. The catch is that the calendar view — the part closest to Sunsama’s timeboxing — sits behind Premium at the time of writing, so treat the free version as a list app with a timer rather than a planner.
If the timer is the piece you actually want, it’s worth comparing against the free focus timers on Android before you settle.
Best for: people who want one app for the list and the starting-a-task problem.
Noodl — a free Android day list that doesn’t punish the days you miss
Sunsama’s shutdown review has a hidden emotional job: it moves unfinished work forward without making it feel like debt. That’s the part free planners usually get wrong, because leftovers turn red and pile up until you stop opening the app. Noodl is a free Android task app with no ads and no sign-up where past-due tasks move overnight into a Revisit list labeled “Ready when you are” — no red, no overdue count — alongside a Today view you reorder by hand, a Later section for anything scheduled ahead, and a focus timer you can set anywhere from 5 to 120 minutes. There’s no calendar sync and no time estimates, so it covers the small-list and the shutdown moves, not the timeboxing one.
Best for: people who want the gentle daily list, on Android, without an account.
The ritual was never the expensive part
If you’ve cycled through six planners and blamed yourself each time, notice what actually happened: you found a system that worked, and then it became a line item. That’s a pricing problem, not a character one.
Rebuild the two moves that matter to you, in whatever free thing you’ll actually open, and let the other three go. If you want a wider shortlist to pick from, the roundup of free ADHD apps on Android covers more of the field. The plan is the point. The subscription was just the packaging.