A free ADHD planner app is worth signing up for when the free version is the whole product rather than a sample of it. In this category free usually means one of four things: a trial with an end date, a feature wall where the part you came for is paid, a cap on how much you can keep, or an app funded by ads or by your data.
Before you sign up, find where the paid line falls, check that your data can leave, and look at what the app does after you miss a week. Nortefy is free in every version — all twelve modules, no card, no feature gates and no time limit.
What does “free” usually mean in a planner app?
Free means four different things in a planner app, and the difference only shows up later.
- A timed trial. The whole app for a set number of days, then a card. It is clearly labelled, and it is the most honest of the four.
- A feature wall. Free for as long as you like, with the thing you actually came for — the history, the second list, the phone version — sitting on the paid side.
- A usage cap. Free up to a number: so many tasks, so many projects, so many days you can look back. You meet the number in week three, not on day one.
- Funded some other way. No price, because the money arrives from advertising or from what the app learns about you.
None of this is dishonest, and selling software with a trial is a perfectly fair way to do it. The one to watch is the limit you only reach once the setting-up is behind you, because that is the exact moment a paywall is built for.
Why does the paywall matter more for an ADHD brain?
Because the expensive part of adopting a planner was never the subscription — it's the setup, and a wall you hit in week three charges you for that work a second time.
Moving in costs real executive effort. The labels, the first list, a week of remembering the thing exists at all. Hit a limit after that and the choice is pay, or do the whole move again somewhere else. Plenty of people do neither, and the app joins the pile of abandoned ones, where the abandonment itself becomes another small entry on the ledger.
So the figure to compare isn't monthly. It's how much of your own work you lose on the day the free tier stops being enough.
How do the common kinds of free compare?
Each kind of free has its catch in a different place, and each one shows itself at a different moment.
| What free means | Where the catch shows up | What to check first |
|---|---|---|
| A timed trial | On the day it ends | Whether a card is required up front |
| A feature wall | The week you need that one feature | Which side of the wall your main use sits on |
| A usage cap | Once you have enough in it to care | The number, and how fast you will reach it |
| Ads or data | Quietly, and never on the pricing page | The privacy policy, and whether data is sold |
| Free in every version | Nowhere, if the terms say so in writing | That the terms are written down rather than implied |
What should you check before signing up?
Check three things: where the paid line falls, whether your data can leave, and what the app does after you miss a week.
- Read the pricing page before the signup page. One click, and it settles most of this.
- Find the export. A planner you can walk away from with everything you put in is a smaller commitment than one you can't, whatever either of them costs.
- Ask what a gap costs. Look at the screenshots and work out what Monday looks like after a week away. A rolled-over backlog, a broken chain and a red overdue column are the three that end adoption.
- Count the setup. If the app needs a weekend of configuring before anything of yours can go in it, the configuring quietly becomes the project.
Is a free planner enough for ADHD?
Usually, yes — price is rarely what decides whether a planner survives a hard month.
What decides it is smaller and duller. Whether the list ends with the day. Whether the app is calm when you come back. Whether opening it on a bad Tuesday costs anything. Those are design decisions rather than paid features, and plenty of free tools make them well while plenty of paid ones don't. ✏️
If you have abandoned three of these already, the thing to change is the greeting, not the budget. Starting over after abandoning a tracker covers what to do with the blank weeks, and habit tracking without streaks covers the mechanic most often responsible for the gap feeling expensive.
Where Nortefy fits
Nortefy is a free web app for ADHD, autistic and AuDHD adults — a well-tailored notebook for a noisy mind — and Planner is its daily page.
- Free in every version. Nortefy is free in every version, not only during the beta: all twelve modules, no card, no feature gates and no time limit. Premium has been announced but not launched, and it will sit on top of an app that stays free, with a waitlist that locks a founding price.
- Nothing rolls over. Nortefy's Planner holds today's list and only today's, at most 20 tasks a day with up to 11 labels. Unfinished tasks stay in their own day, dimmed, never red, and moving one forward is a deliberate act.
- The count is for showing up. Planner's Day Streak counts consecutive days you arrived with a plan, not days you finished everything on it.
- Starting gets help. A Nortefy task can carry an optional focus timer, and an optional floating dock pins today's tasks to every page you open.
- You can leave with all of it. Nortefy exports one zip of CSVs covering every working year from Profile → Export Data, and it runs no ads, sells no data and carries no third-party trackers.
Nortefy is a web app, so it opens at the same address with the same account on a phone, and it installs to a home screen without going near an app store. 🧭
Common questions
- Does Nortefy have a free trial?
- No, because there is nothing for a trial to end. Nortefy is free in every version rather than free for a period: all twelve modules, no card at signup, no feature gates and no time limit. A paid Premium layer has been announced but not launched, and it will sit on top of an app that stays free, with a waitlist that locks a founding price.
- Is free ever a warning sign?
- It is a fair question to ask rather than a red flag on its own. Software with no price is paid for somehow, and the honest options are a paid tier alongside it, advertising, data, or someone choosing to fund it. An app that will tell you which one it is has already answered the question; an app that is vague about it has answered a different one.
- What happens to my data if a free app starts charging?
- That depends entirely on whether it lets you export, which is why the export matters more than the price. A planner that hands back everything you put in leaves you a way out if the terms change. One that does not makes every month of use a little more expensive to walk away from, whatever the sticker says.
- Do I need an ADHD diagnosis to use an ADHD planner app?
- No. An app that suits an ADHD brain is one that does not punish a gap and does not ask to be maintained, and that suits plenty of people who have never been assessed. Nothing on this page is diagnostic, and a planner is not an assessment, a treatment or a substitute for talking to a clinician.
- Is a paper planner better than a free app?
- Paper is genuinely good at some of this: it asks nothing of you between sessions, it never changes its terms, and writing by hand slows a racing morning down. What paper cannot do is be in your pocket, carry a record across years, or add up what you logged. Plenty of people run both, and the honest split is paper for today and software for the pattern.
If you are comparing free planners, the useful question isn't what one costs today. It is what the free version is: a sample of the product, or the product.
Nortefy is free in every version — all twelve modules, no card and no feature gates, with the terms written out on the pricing page. The manifesto says why it is built this way.