Starting July 25, 2021, Matterlist is available as a free app. There is no up-front cost, no ads, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases. All premium features previously available to subscribers only are now available for everyone. There’s another significant change: the sync servers and account functionality are discontinued. Matterlist now stores data on your device only. However, it now includes Import and Export options that let you backup and restore your data anytime you want.
Why Go Free?
Initially, we planned to run Matterlist as a traditional subscription-based SaaS app. However, we couldn’t turn Matterlist into a business. We are not backed by venture capital, so we currently pay the server costs out of our own pockets. To reduce our expenses, we decided to rewrite the Matterlist to use local storage only, shut down the servers, and release it as a free app.
Local Storage Only
Matterlist now stores data on your device only — there’s no cloud sync. We discontinued the servers to reduce our costs. The upside is privacy and control — now you completely own your data, and your tasks are stored on your device only. The downside is the absence of cloud sync, which places the responsibility to back up your data on you. You can now use export and import functions to backup and restore your data.
Export and Import
Since our cloud sync is now discontinued, and your data is now stored on your device only, data backup becomes a concern. The new export and import functions allow you to manually backup and restore your Matterlist database whenever you want. To create a backup copy of your database, use the Export Database command. For details, see Export and Import.