Todoist Revenue: The $100 Million Number Its Founder Calls Boring (2026)

Quick answer (2026): Todoist, the flagship app of the bootstrapped, remote-first company Doist, has crossed more than $100 million in cumulative revenue since 2007, a figure its founder Amir Salihefendic disclosed himself in July 2024. Public annual run-rate figures cluster in the ~$20M to ~$26.5M ARR range for 2023 to 2025 (2023 disclosed; 2024 estimated), off roughly 300,000 paying customers and a team of about 90 to 100 people across nearly 40 countries. Doist took a single ~$40K round in 2011 and has otherwise funded every dollar of growth from customer revenue. The company does not publish a live, to-the-dollar ARR number, so anyone quoting one precisely is estimating.

How much revenue does Todoist actually make?

Start with the one number that comes straight from the founder. On July 3, 2024, Amir Salihefendic posted that Todoist had "made more than $100 million in total revenue" over its lifetime. That is cumulative, not annual, and it is the cleanest hard figure in the whole story because it came from the person who signs the payroll.

The annual picture is fuzzier by design. Doist is private, profitable, and under no obligation to publish a live number, so the public ARR figures come from a mix of founder interviews and third-party trackers. Put side by side, they land in a consistent band: roughly $20 million ARR as of 2023, drifting toward an estimated $26.5 million by late 2024. Amir's own 2025 conference keynote referenced having "recently passed $20M ARR," which tells you the company is comfortable confirming the floor and not the exact ceiling.

So the honest one-line answer to "what is Todoist's revenue" in 2026 is: a bootstrapped business somewhere in the low-to-mid $20-million-a-year range, with $100M+ banked across its history. Precision beyond that is guesswork, and it is worth being suspicious of any page that gives you a single confident 2026 figure.

Why the founder says $100 million is the boring part

Here is the part most revenue write-ups skip. When Amir shared the $100M number, he immediately called it uninteresting:

"Todoist has made more than $100 million in total revenue, which isn't very interesting because many others have reached this number. What's interesting is that we did it in our unique way: fully bootstrapped. Customers have supported us since the beginning, and we've used only our revenues to improve things further."

That reframing is the actual story. A nine-figure lifetime revenue number is not rare in software. Doing it with no venture capital, no acquisition, no growth-at-all-costs phase, and a headcount that has stayed around 100 people is what makes Doist unusual. The revenue is a byproduct; the how is the moat.

It is a very different flavor of transparency from the profiles we have covered where founders went quiet on purpose, like buttondown-revenue-392k-number-justin-duke-stopped-publishing. Amir is loud about the cumulative number and the philosophy, and quiet about the live ARR, because the philosophy is the marketing and the exact monthly figure is not.

The 17-year climb: a dated revenue ledger

The most useful thing we can do is line up every credible data point with its source and its type, so you can see the slope instead of arguing about a single figure.

Read down the slope and the shape is clear: about $1M ARR in 2015 to the $20M-plus range by 2023. That is roughly an eight-year climb to 20x, or a few million dollars of net new ARR per year on average. By venture standards it is slow. By owner-economics standards, where every dollar of that revenue belonged to the founders and staff rather than a cap table, it is one of the better outcomes in indie software. It puts Doist in the same rare company as fully-owned operators like ahrefs-revenue-257m-number-it-let-slip and pieter-levels-revenue-never-sell-solo-portfolio, where the interesting metric is not the top line but who keeps it.

The detail nobody quotes: Todoist survived four years of neglect

Buried in Amir's early history is the most instructive fact in the whole ledger, and almost no revenue page mentions it. Between roughly 2008 and 2012, he largely stopped developing Todoist to work on a different startup (a social network called Plurk), leaving the app on maintenance and bug fixes only. Growth over those four years was, in his words, almost flat. And yet the product kept its users, because it solved a real, recurring, daily problem well enough that people did not leave.

That is a retention lesson you cannot buy. A product that survives four years of its own founder ignoring it has something most funded startups never build: demand that does not depend on constant shipping. When Amir came back full time in 2012, he was restarting on top of a base that had quietly held, and revenue reached salary-level within months. The moat was not the roadmap. It was the fact that the core job-to-be-done was durable.

What actually transfers (and what does not)

The temptation with a story like this is to copy the slogans. "Build for yourself." "Stay bootstrapped." "Go async." Some of that genuinely transfers. Some of it is survivorship talking. Here is the operator's read.

What transfers. Charge from day one. Amir put a ~$29/year price on Todoist before he had any idea whether it was the right number, and revenue from customers became the validation signal, cleaner and earlier than any raise. Second, own your retention by solving a durable problem, not a trendy one; the four-year-neglect test is the proof. Third, treat remote and async as a system with documentation and trust behind it, the way Doist has since 2011, not as a perk you bolt on.

What does not transfer cleanly. "Build something for yourself and be the main user" worked because task management is a need Amir actually had and hundreds of millions of people share. That is survivorship-flavored advice for any niche you do not personally live in; being your own user is a great filter only when your problem is also a big market's problem. And the phrase "fully bootstrapped" is very nearly true but not literally zero: trackers show a single small round of about $40K in 2011 before the company went its own way. The honest framing is "customer-funded," which is the part that matters.

The biggest hidden cost is time. Bootstrapping to a nine-figure lifetime number took Doist the better part of two decades. That is the trade: you swap growth rate for total control and optionality. For founders like the ones we profile at OperatorBook, and for the operators living the month-to-month reality in stories like the-month-i-killed-the-feature-everyone-asked-for-14k-mrr, that trade is often the right one. Just go in knowing it is a trade, not a hack.