Productivity Apps, And What A Full Stack Costs

I opened the two biggest productivity apps roundups on Google this morning and counted. Between them they name about thirty tools and quote a price for nearly all of them. Neither one adds the prices up. Not once, not even for a sample stack of four.

That's the gap I want to fill, because the decision you're really making isn't which app is best. It's how many nine-dollar monthly charges you'll agree to before you stop noticing them.

Quick answer for skimmers. A normal-looking stack costs about $568 a year at the list prices I checked today, the same stack billed monthly instead of annually lands nearer $648, and a free-tier version of roughly the same setup costs nothing at all. Most people should sit on free tiers a lot longer than they do. Everything below is that arithmetic, plus what happens to your notes when you stop paying, which is the part none of the roundups touch.

What The Big Roundups Actually Give You

Credit where it's due. Buffer's piece lists nine tools with a price table right at the top, Zapier's covers twenty-three, and both authors clearly used the things rather than paraphrasing marketing pages. I loaded both today instead of going from memory, which I'd recommend to anyone quoting them.

What they hand you is breadth. What they don't hand you is any picture of month fourteen, when four subscriptions are live and you've forgotten what two of them do.

Neither article mentions data export. I checked. Buffer at least tells you to keep a master task list somewhere safe while you're hopping between tools, which is closer to useful than anything else I found in the top ten, but it stops there and moves on to the next recommendation.

The Stack Nobody Adds Up

$567.98. That's a plausible year of productivity apps, built from list prices I pulled off each company's own pricing page on 28 July 2026, for one person who isn't being extravagant.

Here's the build. Notion Plus for docs, Sunsama for daily planning, Toggl Track Starter for time, Microsoft 365 Personal because you need a spreadsheet that opens other people's spreadsheets, and GoodNotes Pro because you write on a tablet.

Eighty dollars of difference just for paying in twelfths. Notion says yearly billing saves up to 20% on top of that, which I haven't put in the table because the exact discount depends on the plan and I didn't want to quote a number I'd only half-loaded.

Now, none of those five apps is a bad app. That's the point I keep coming back to. Every individual charge is defensible and the total is a phone.

What You Keep If You Stop Paying

So what happens in month fourteen when you cancel three of them? This is the question I'd want answered before subscribing to anything, and it's the question the roundups skip entirely, presumably because the answer is a bit awkward for everyone involved.

I went through each vendor's own documentation for this table rather than trusting a review site.

That Notion row is worth reading slowly. Their own help page says the option to export workspace content as a PDF is going away between now and the end of August 2026, while HTML, Markdown and CSV stay. It also warns that a workspace export can take up to 30 hours to process. Thirty hours. If your exit plan is "I'll just export everything the day I leave", plan for it to be a two-day job.

The GoodNotes one bothers me more than it probably should. You don't lose the notebooks, you lose the ability to have more than three of them, and everything you pull out arrives watermarked. That's not data loss, it's closer to a hostage situation with good manners.

Obsidian is the only row in that table where cancelling changes nothing about your files, and that's because the files were never in Obsidian to begin with. They're Markdown in a folder. If you want the longer version of that argument, I wrote it up in the Obsidian and Notion comparison, which gets into where each one actually stores your stuff.

The Renewal Price Is Not The Price You Saw

Toggl Track's Premium tier is $14 per license per month. Then it renews at $18.

That's on their own pricing page, stated plainly, and I've never seen it repeated in a roundup. The roundups say fourteen. Over a year the gap is $48 per seat, which is roughly a year of Obsidian Sync, and it arrives quietly in month thirteen when nobody's paying attention to the card statement.

I don't think Toggl is being sneaky. They put it in writing on the page anyone can read. But it's a good example of what gets lost when a listicle compresses a pricing page into one number in a table, and it makes me want to check the renewal line on everything now.

There's a version of this in the other direction too. GoodNotes Pro is $35.99 a year. Their AI Pass add-on is $9.99 a month, which annualises to $119.88, or more than three times the subscription it's bolted onto. The add-on costs triple the product. I keep staring at that.

The Per Seat Multiplier

A friend asked me to sanity-check a budget for a five-person studio last year and I assumed the answer would be "times five". It wasn't, and the direction it went wrong in surprised me, because two of the lines got worse per person while one got dramatically better.

Per-seat pricing isn't linear once you cross from the personal tier into the team tier, since most vendors change the product name and the number at the same time. Sunsama goes from $17 a month solo on yearly billing to $20 a month per person once you add teammates. GoodNotes goes from $35.99 a year to $120 per seat a year. Same software, roughly.

Microsoft goes the other way, and it's the outlier by a mile.

Five people cost 5.4 times one person, not five, and the whole overshoot comes from those two tier jumps. Meanwhile Microsoft 365 Family is $129.99 a year and covers one to six people at a terabyte each, so if you fill all six slots you're paying about $21.67 per person for a full office suite. Their own comparison page notes the AI features go to the subscription owner only, which is the catch, but the storage and the desktop apps are genuinely shared.

I'm not sure the studio ever used that spreadsheet. The GoodNotes line was what stopped the conversation, since nobody had budgeted for a note app to be the second most expensive item on the list.

Free Tiers, Read Like A Contract

The free tiers are where the actual decision lives, and almost nobody reads them literally.

GoodNotes free is three files. Not three notebooks plus some whiteboards, three items total across notebooks, whiteboards and text documents, with 100MB of storage and 20 minutes of audio. Notability free is five notes. Notion free has a 5 MB cap on individual file uploads and keeps a week of page history.

Those aren't trials with a soft edge. They're small numbers, and a student who takes handwritten notes for one semester will blow through all three of them in about a fortnight.

The Apps You Already Paid For

What annoys me about the roundup format is that it can only recommend things, so the software already sitting on your machine never appears, even when it's the correct answer.

macOS has shipped Stickies for a very long time. Apple's own documentation for it describes coloured notes that float above other windows or go semi-transparent, hold images and PDFs with markup tools, do find and replace across notes, and export to plain text, RTF or RTFD. It'll also migrate every note you have into the Notes app in one move, which is a cleaner exit path than several paid apps offer. Windows has Sticky Notes free from the Microsoft Store. Neither one ever makes a list, because there's no affiliate link on a thing you already own.

I've written up the whole category over in the sticky notepad comparison, including the paper versions, which have their own arithmetic.

The same applies to text you don't want to keep. Half the notes anybody takes in a day are disposable, and for those a browser tab is the right tool. The online notepad options are free, most of them store text in your own browser rather than on a server, and none of them will email you about your trial ending.

What I Actually Run

I should admit something before this reads like advice from a person with a beautiful system. I run a lot of projects out of a single repository and my note-taking is mostly Markdown files sitting next to the code, opened in whatever editor I already have in front of me. It's not a system anyone would put on YouTube.

The reason isn't discipline. It's that I got burned by the lock-in question in a way that had nothing to do with notes. I've shipped seven digital toolkits priced between $29 and $49, and the first sale on one of my sites was $29.99, roughly two months after launch. During those two months I did not have a tooling problem. I had a nobody-can-find-this problem, and the site sat at an average position of 47 in Search Console for a long stretch, which is a polite way of saying no human being ever saw it.

Position 47 taught me something I now apply to app choices, which is that time spent on the setup feels like progress in the moment and usually isn't, and I genuinely don't think you can tell the difference from the inside while you're in the middle of doing it. A better task manager was never going to fix that site.

So my honest position is that the app matters less than the roundups imply, and the free tier of almost anything will hold you for longer than you think. I generate most of my assets locally on an M4 Pro, so my marginal cost per extra thing is close to zero, and that biases me toward tools that don't meter me. Take that bias into account when you read the rest of this.

Across everything I've sold, all products, all time, it comes to somewhere around ten thousand dollars. Lifetime, not monthly. At $568 a year in subscriptions, a productivity stack would have eaten a meaningful slice of that, and I'd have nothing to point at.

Where The Suite Fits In

One thing worth separating out. There's a difference between the individual apps in that table and a productivity suite, which is the bundle-of-office-tools category that Microsoft and Google fight over.

Suites are priced per person per month and cover the boring stuff, documents and mail and a spreadsheet. Individual productivity apps are priced the same way but each one solves a narrower problem, which is exactly why five of them add up faster than one suite does. Microsoft 365 Personal at $99.99 a year is cheaper than Sunsama alone, and it includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote plus a terabyte of storage.

I'm not saying replace your planner with Outlook. I'm saying the price per problem solved is wildly uneven across this category and nobody points it out.

The Questions People Ask Me About This

Do productivity apps actually make you more productive? Some, a bit, for a while. The pattern I've watched in myself and in everyone I've compared notes with is that the first two weeks of a new app feel enormous, because setting it up is legible work with visible output, and then it settles into being a slightly nicer version of the list you already had. That's not nothing. It's also not what the marketing implies.

How many should I use? Fewer than you're using. I'd argue for one place things go in, one place time lives, and then stop. Every extra app is another surface where a note can be the only note that matters and also the one you can't find, and the failure mode of a five-app stack isn't cost, it's that you stop trusting any of them.

What's the best free option? Depends what you're solving. For writing and keeping things, Obsidian, because it's free without limits and the files stay yours. For lists, most free tiers are genuinely fine, and Todoist's free plan gives you 5 personal projects and a week of activity history, which covers a normal life. For documents, LibreOffice is free under the Mozilla Public License and the current build is 26.2.5.

Are the paid tiers ever worth it? Yes, when the thing you're paying for is other people. Almost every paid tier I priced is really selling collaboration, sync across devices, or team admin. If you're one person on one laptop, you're often paying for features designed for a company.

Is it better to pay annually? On the numbers, yes, and it was $80 a year in my sample stack. On the behaviour, monthly billing makes you notice the charge, and noticing is how subscriptions get cancelled. I've kept things on monthly deliberately for that reason and I'd guess it saved me more than the discount would have.

What I'd Do Starting Over

Pick the free tier of one note tool and one list tool. Use them for a month without customising anything. Then, if something breaks, pay for the thing that broke, and only that thing.

If you want to go deeper on the individual pieces, the task management applications comparison covers the list side properly, time management apps covers the calendar and blocking side, and if you write by hand, the best note taking app for iPad piece has the multi-year cost math for the tablet apps, where the pricing gets genuinely strange.

The thing I'd resist is the roundup instinct, the one that treats app selection as the interesting problem. It's the comfortable problem. Whatever you're actually trying to get done, the app was probably not the reason it wasn't getting done, and I say that as somebody who spent two months polishing a product nobody could find.