The Case for Fewer Features: Why We Stopped at 5
Most apps add features to justify their price. We have 5 features and charge $4. Here's why that's a feature, not a bug.
There are 200+ task management apps on Product Hunt. Most of them launched with a headline about simplicity. By version 3.0, they had subtasks, recurring tasks, task dependencies, Gantt charts, and a premium tier.
This is not a criticism. It’s a pattern.
Features are how software products justify their existence. Every roadmap meeting is a negotiation between what users ask for and what the product needs to be. The problem is that what users ask for and what users need are often different things — and over time, the asking always wins.
What feature creep actually costs
Adding features to a productivity app doesn’t just add complexity. It adds decisions.
Every feature is a choice point. Do I tag this task? Should it go in the Work project or the Work - Admin project? Does this have a deadline? Should I add a note? Is this a subtask of something else, or its own thing?
Barry Schwartz wrote an entire book about this — The Paradox of Choice — arguing that more options reliably produce less satisfaction and more paralysis. The phenomenon he was describing mostly applies to consumer decisions, but it maps cleanly to productivity software. The more configuration your tool offers, the more time you spend configuring it instead of using it.
Then there’s Hick’s Law, which is the more formal version: the time it takes to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of options. Double the choices, and the decision takes meaningfully longer. In UX, this is usually cited to justify fewer menu items. It applies equally to the feature set of a productivity tool.
When your todo app has projects, tags, due dates, priorities, subtasks, and assignees, every task entry becomes a small bureaucratic event. You’re not capturing a thought — you’re filing a ticket.
The AnotherTodo model
AnotherTodo has five tools:
- list_todos — see your list
- add_todo — add something
- update_todo — change the text
- delete_todo — remove it
- toggle_todo — mark it done
No priorities. No due dates. No tags. No projects. No settings page. Flat pricing at $4 a month — one plan, one price, no seat licenses.
This is not minimalism as an aesthetic. It’s not a design statement. It’s what a todo list actually requires.
The discipline — if you can call it that — was in deciding what a todo list is for. A todo list is an external brain dump. Its job is to hold the things you need to do so your head doesn’t have to. That’s it. Everything else — priorities, deadlines, projects, collaboration — is project management wearing a disguise.
What you actually lose
Let’s be honest about this.
No due dates means you can’t schedule tasks. If you have a hard deadline on something, you’ll need a calendar for that. AnotherTodo is not a calendar. It doesn’t want to be.
No projects or tags means everything lives in one flat list. If you have 80 tasks spread across seven life domains, that list will get unwieldy fast. AnotherTodo is not a project management tool. It’s not Notion. It’s not Linear. It’s a list.
No collaboration means it’s a personal tool. You cannot assign tasks to teammates. You cannot share a list. This app makes no attempt to be useful for teams. If you need task delegation, you need a different product.
No recurring tasks means you’ll add “take out the bins” every week manually, like an animal.
These are real trade-offs. The question is whether the trade-offs are worth it for the type of user this product is actually designed for — which is: someone who needs to write things down, see them in one place, and do them. Not someone running a product team. Not someone managing a complex project. Someone who needs a list.
The paradox of the well-featured productivity app
Here is something that happens with sophisticated productivity systems. You spend more time maintaining them than you save by using them.
You build the perfect Notion workspace with linked databases and status automations. You tag everything. You set up your weekly review template. You maintain your Areas and Projects and Resources like a digital garden. You read blog posts about optimizing your PKM.
And somewhere in there, the productivity system becomes the thing you’re productive at, rather than the tool that makes you productive at other things.
This is not a new observation. GTD enthusiasts talk about it. Productivity Twitter talks about it. Everyone who has ever spent four hours building a task management system and then not used it for two weeks has experienced it personally.
The feature set of your productivity tool should be in proportion to what you’re using it for. If you’re a project manager running a 20-person engineering team, use a project management tool. If you’re a person with a list of things to do, use a list.
Why we stopped at 5
The honest answer is not philosophical.
We stopped at 5 because that’s what a todo list requires. Add, read, update, delete, toggle. That’s CRUD plus one domain-specific operation. There was no grand decision to be minimal. There was just the observation that nothing else was necessary.
The secondary observation — the one that turned out to matter — was that not adding more features meant the product stayed usable. New users understand it in about 30 seconds. There’s no onboarding flow because there’s nothing to onboard. There’s no settings page because there’s nothing to configure. You sign up, you get an MCP URL, you connect it to Claude, you have a todo list.
The people for whom this is exactly right are specific. They want capture over organization. They want frictionless input over elaborate structure. They’re using Claude anyway, so the MCP integration is a natural fit — tell the AI to add a task and it’s done, no context switching required.
For everyone else — genuinely, use a different product. We are not trying to be everything to everyone. We are trying to be exactly one thing, perfectly, for $4 a month.
On software bloat
There’s a broader point here about the software industry, but this post isn’t really the place for it.
The short version: most software gets worse as it gets bigger. The exception is software that is adding features users genuinely need. The rule is software that is adding features to compete, to justify pricing, to satisfy enterprise procurement checklists, to give the product team something to ship.
The result is that most productivity software is now feature-complete in the sense that it contains every feature anyone has ever requested, and unusable in the sense that no one knows where anything is.
AnotherTodo has a different problem. Some users want features we don’t have. We know. We’ve read the emails. The answer is: this is not the right product for those users. There are excellent products that do what they’re asking for.
What we’re building is the smallest possible useful thing. Five features. Four dollars. One list.
That’s the pitch.