Which ADHD Apps Paywall the Basics? A Free Tier Check Across 12 Tools

Most “best ADHD app” lists compare prices. Price is rarely what goes wrong.

What goes wrong is quieter. A free trial that needs your card on day one, then renews in a month you’ve forgotten about. A free plan that hides your old meeting notes after 30 days. The one feature that actually helps your brain, like repeating routines or a history you can look back on, sitting behind the upgrade button.

For neurodivergent brains, those details matter more than a few dollars a month. So I went back through the ADHD tools I’ve covered this year, added three that readers keep asking about (Goblin Tools, Opal and Llama Life), and asked three questions of each:

1. Can you do the core job for free? Not a demo. The actual thing the tool exists to do.
2. Does the trial need your card? Forgotten renewals are a well-known ADHD tax. A no-card trial removes that risk.
3. Does anything you create disappear or lock later? Your notes, your history, your data.

A note on method: these answers come from each tool’s own pricing pages, help centres, app store listings and in-app upgrade screens, checked between August and October 2026. Prices are in US dollars unless marked A$, which is what showed when I checked from Australia. Pricing changes often, so treat this as a snapshot and check before you buy.

The generous ones

Lunatask’s free plan is unusually complete for this category. You get tasks with automatic prioritisation, time blocking, seven daily habits and two features most apps charge for: a mood tracker and a journal. The free plan limits you to two Areas of Life (separate spaces like Work and Home), which is plenty to start with.

Premium is $8 a month, or $6 a month billed yearly. It adds unlimited areas and habits, extra planning methods and calendar connections. There’s also a one-off lifetime option at $300, available in the desktop app. Nothing you make on the free plan disappears if you never upgrade, and you can export everything at any time.

Code WHATSTICKS takes 20% off Premium. Type it in by hand at Lunatask’s own checkout (the App Store version can’t use it).

Links and further reading

Lunatask · My full review

Goblin Tools is a set of small, single-job helpers built for neurodivergent brains. The one most people know is Magic ToDo: type a task you’re stuck on, like “clean the kitchen”, and it breaks it into smaller steps. You can turn a “spiciness” dial up to make the steps smaller. Others include Formalizer (rewrites a message in a different tone), Judge (tells you how a message might come across), Estimator (guesses how long a task will take) and Chef (turns what’s in your fridge into a recipe).

On the website, all of it is free, with no account, ads or paywall. The phone apps are different: the iPhone app costs A$2.99 up front, with an optional Pro subscription on top (A$5.99 a month or A$59.99 a year). So the answer depends on where you use it. If a browser tab works for you, you never need to pay.

One warning: search the app stores carefully. There are lookalike apps with similar names from other developers. The official one lists Skyhook as the developer, and goblin.tools links to it directly.

Links and further reading

Goblin Tools

FLOWN’s 30-day trial needs no card, which I wish every tool did. What most reviews miss is what happens next: there’s an ongoing free tier after the trial, with Friday sessions and four community sessions a month. That’s not enough for daily body doubling, but it’s enough to keep using it on hard weeks without paying.

Paid plans are $25 a month, or $19 a month billed yearly.

Links and further reading

My full FLOWN review

Focusmate’s free plan gives you three sessions a week. That’s enough to find out within a fortnight whether body doubling works for your brain. Unlimited sessions need the Plus plan, which is $12 a month or $8 a month billed yearly. The free version is a genuine product, not a teaser.

Links and further reading

Body doubling apps compared

Pocket is a hardware recorder, so you pay for the device up front. After that, the free app tier is generous: unlimited standard transcription, automatic to-do lists, mind maps and two Ask Pocket questions a day.

The catch is time. Free summaries are kept for 30 days, and Pro ($19.99 a month, or $16.59 a month billed yearly) keeps them forever. If you only need this week’s action items, that’s fine. If you go back to meetings from months ago, export anything important before the 30 days are up.

Links and further reading

Hey Pocket · My full review

The fair ones, with a catch

Structured’s free version does the core job: a visual timeline you drag tasks onto. That’s why so many people start here.

The catch is routines. Structured’s own help centre lists repeating tasks as a premium feature. For a lot of ADHD brains, routines are the whole point, so know this before you build your mornings around it. Pro is A$34.99 a year, A$11.99 a month or A$129.99 once for lifetime access. If you cancel Pro, your tasks stay. Pro has a three-day trial, and Structured’s help centre says it converts to a paid subscription unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it ends.

Links and further reading

Tiimo vs Structured

Tiimo has a free plan on iPhone and Android with a basic visual planner, to-dos, a focus timer and a few AI chats. The web app needs Pro. Tiimo’s pricing page doesn’t list prices, and they vary by country, so check the App Store or the in-app screen for what you’d pay before you start.

The thing to know is the trial. Tiimo’s free trial comes with the yearly plan, and starting it needed a card or PayPal. That means a forgotten cancellation costs you a full year, not one month. It’s still a tool I rate highly for time blindness. Set a calendar reminder the day you start, two days before the trial ends.

Links and further reading

Tiimo vs Structured · Tiimo vs Sunsama

Granola’s free plan gives you unlimited AI meeting notes. The limit is time: you can only open notes from the last 30 days. Older notes aren’t deleted. They’re kept, and they unlock if you upgrade to the Business plan ($14 a month). New users currently get their first month of the paid plan free.

One setup catch: calendar linking only works with Google Workspace accounts, not a personal Gmail.

Links and further reading

Granola · Granola, Otter and Hey Pocket compared

Notta’s free plan gives you 120 minutes of transcription a month, but each recording stops at 3 minutes. That rules out real meetings entirely. It works for a quick test of the accuracy, not for regular use. Pro is $8.17 a month billed yearly.

Links and further reading

Notta

Opal is different from everything else here. It doesn’t help you plan. It blocks the apps and sites that pull you away, which for some ADHD brains is the bigger problem. It runs on iPhone, Mac and Android.

The free plan is limited. Opal’s pricing page describes it as “1 Rule”, which can be a schedule, a time limit or an open limit. Opal’s own FAQ and some reviews have said three recurring sessions, so the number has changed or been described differently over time. Pro adds unlimited rules. It’s listed at US$99.99 a year (about US$8.29 a month), US$19.99 a month, or US$399 once for lifetime. There’s a free week on the yearly plan and a three-day trial on the monthly one, and the page doesn’t say whether a card is needed to start either, so check the screen before you tap.

One thing worth knowing: blocking only works if you don’t switch it off. Opal has stricter modes that make it harder to cancel a session halfway through. If your pattern is “I’ll turn it off for a minute”, that’s the feature to test.

Links and further reading

Opal

The ones with no free plan

Sunsama has no free plan at all. It costs $22 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly. In its favour, the 14-day trial needs no card, so there’s nothing to forget to cancel.

Is it worth paying for? For a specific kind of ADHD brain, yes. If you chronically plan more than a day can hold, Sunsama’s daily planning ritual and capacity warning are built for exactly that. But it’s a tool you can’t use long term without paying.

Links and further reading

Structured vs Sunsama

Llama Life gives every task on your list its own countdown timer. You set how long each thing should take, start the first one and work down the list. For time blindness, that’s a simple and clever idea: you can see your day running out, task by task.

There’s no free plan, but the 7-day trial needs no card. After that it’s $6 a month or $39 a year. It works in a web browser, which makes it one of the few tools here that runs properly on a desktop, plus iPhone and Android apps.

Links and further reading

Llama Life

What I’d look for in any ADHD app

No-card trials beat long trials. A 30-day trial that needs your card is riskier than a 7-day one that doesn’t, if forgotten renewals are your pattern. Watch for trials that come with a yearly plan, like Tiimo’s.

Check where your data lives after the free period. Time limits on your own notes are easy to miss on day one and painful to discover on day 31.

Find out which tier holds the feature you actually need. For ADHD brains it’s often something small, like repeating routines, reminders or a history to look back on. Check it’s in the plan you’ll actually stay on.

Free doesn’t mean worse. Several tools here, like Lunatask, Goblin Tools, Focusmate and Structured, do their core job well without payment. Start free. Pay only once you know which wall the tool is helping you climb.