I couldn't find a free, no-login, no-AI checklist app–so I built one

How many checklist 'apps' have AI in them? That you couldn't find one without it? Or is it just a marketing thing now to say "no-AI" to bank on the anti-AI movement in tech?

You'd be surprised how many perfectly good companies are diluting their products with irrelevant AI features.

When you're in an empty block in Notion the prompt puts "press space for AI" *before* "/ for commands". Totally blatant disregard for the actual useful features of the app in favor of hyping up their AI stuff.

The programmers that has been around for a while sooner or later starts to notice a pattern.

I remember some salesperson asking if we shouldn't start using XML (or some other thing he had heard, think it was XML). Not sure where he heard it but it made absolutely no sence whatsoever. We were already using XML in the backend talking to others backend services but I was trying my best to get away from it... But there was no reason he would even know what XML is. He hardly knew how to use a computer to browse the web at the time.

Whatever is popular at the moment has to be used or you aren't hip and not following the times.

Whenever something hip comes up, wait 5 years and see if it's still hip. If it's still hip... At least look into it.

Oh, yeah, XML was basically the ‘AI’ of the early noughties; comic levels of hype. Remember XML databases?

We had a consultant try and sell us XML databases as something we had to start working on at once. When I asked them what the advantage was, and how it dealt with a few common circumstances they basically stuttered to a stop. It was very dissapointing.

You can email support to get this disabled. Apparently only the business version has a toggle to do it yourself. Regardless I'm much happier having disabled it now

You can see how that's effed up right? Email support to disable a "feature"?

No doubt. But I think the grand parent wanted to point out to a possible solution for anyone looking for one.

It’s the new GMO-free label

I searched 'checklist app github' and found several free no-ai and no-login options on the top of google results.

So every person needs deploy before using it.

But deploying it yourself is how you ensure your compliance with Butlearian Jihad ideals.

yeah but how many canadians users are you actually expecting

As a Canadian, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I appreciate the consideration.

The 3 I tried had online demos, I didn't need to deploy anything.

How does a post like this gather so many upvotes? There are a bajillion "check list" apps on github

It's a friends and family round.

millhouse1112 probably used Google search

If you send me one that fits my needs, it's easy to use, no deploy neede then I will probably shutdown lalacheck. I don't even have a domain yet.

What are your needs that can't be satisfied by default notes app on phones?

No installed app. Must be shareable.

The trouble is most privacy conscious people want an offline app, not a web app. Sharing is accomplished through traditional file sharing mechanisms.

cl1p.net

Or Apple ships a very good Reminders list app. Surely there’s an equivalent for other brands?

but web based means you can share the URL with anyone on any platform? or am I missing something? you can share reminders app lists, I don't think, and definitely not with android/windows users. https://lalacheck.fly.dev/c/0192f4b8-a7cc-7b40-89c4-454eaa83...

You're posting it here, presumably so people can use it.. yet already advertising that you'll shut it down as soon as something else that fits your needs comes along? What is the point of this if it can't even be relied upon?

I'm building something that fits my needs. More energy I give to this project more will be reliable.

You ignored my original suggestion, so now I'm sensing this is all some sort of strange bad-faith promo game.

What is https://list2go.io/en/ missing? I don't see any AI features, if that's your concern.

I like it. It's simple. Shareable. But it's focused on shopping lists. I would use for shopping but there is some checklists I don't need that. Like my "Surf backpack list" it's just so I can check the items while i put in the backpack.

Gotcha. Sounds like you've built just what you were looking for :)

I just make a checklist in a note on my phone. It’s accessible even when I have no network access and I can share it with people.

What app?

Just the normal iOS notes app.

But you can’t share it with people running Android.

Microsoft Todo, formerly Wunderlist, may or may not have an iOS app. It's pretty good.

Todoist exists but both require a more complicated setup.

It’s been established the main point of the posted app is having shared lists with no install or account creation required, just share a link.

For checklists, iOS Reminders app is great,

Not op, but ColorNote is good.

Text.

Tasks or Markor are what I use and both are great, and you can syn both pretty easily on different platforms.

You may want to consider a keep-alive strategy based on usage and not an arbitrary static timeout. What if I need my checklist for 7.5 days? A corollary is that this may reduce your overall data usage as a lot of people may create a list and immediately abandon it. If you can expire those in less than 7 days, you're saving.

Good idea. It's simple to track this. What idle duration limit makes sense for deletion?

That's a great question! And fortunately, one where you can use human behavior as a guide: if someone is actively using a checklist it seems reasonable to presume they're at least accessing it once a day. So as a quick first-pass, double that time period to two days. Also start collecting usage metrics and mine those in the future to further refine this number.

User initiated; maybe some arbitrarily long duration measured in years.

90 days since last view, or 1 year if you can afford to be generous. For "slow burn" projects with other people checklists easily go longer than a week without being looked at.

there's literally thousands of checklist apps

It’s marketing. They want to make it seem unique and special.

I know ˆˆ. Could you send me a simple one that fits my needs?

TickTick

Needs login

If it does that's recent, I used it for ages before creating an account. I did a while ago, for some features that needed it (a joint list with my wife, mainly) but it wasn't mandatory, and still free.

All multi-device/synced TODO lists have authentication to keep it private. That's half the utility. Add an item when on your laptop or iPad then when you need it outside you pull out your phone.

TickTick also has markdown notes and a calendar. I use the notes probably as much as lists, which fit desktop usecase better. Lists could be fine if it was mobile only but still annoying.

Ok, but that's not what they want. I love how many people say there's tons of these apps and none of them actually fit what OP asked for.

> none of them actually fit what OP asked for

I highly doubt that. It's just they are the type of apps no one knows about because a developer will throw a TODO app together over a weekend then not support, market it, or abandon the server after a couple years. As I personally experienced at least twice over the years.

If you ask GPT they recommend these that fit the criteria (among quite a few others):

https://2doli.st/ <- this was on HN a year ago with the same headline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091771

https://moartodo.com/

https://flask.io/

- https://2doli.st/ follows the same principles. but as I said before, state in the URL does not work for me. Every update changes the URL. - https://moartodo.com/ is local. Can't be shared. - https://flask.io/ I like it. That's the spirit.

This one doesn't https://shared-lists.com/en/about

https://to-do.office.com/

Free with Office 365 / Microsoft account. Decent desktop & mobile apps too and integration into Outlook/Teams. API available via the Microsoft Graph and integration with PowerAutomate if you want IFTTT/Zapier-like functionality.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/todo-o...

Needs login. I don't want that.

How else are you going to sync your list across devices? It's Microsoft, be very surprised if you didn't have an account for any of their services.

It's just an URL

So now you need another URL-based bookmark service to remember the URL.

For now yes. The idea is to have a disposable checklist. Maybe I will add collections or projects with multiple lists.

Notes (builtin to iOS)

Reminders (builtin to iOS)

My wife uses Android. It should be web based anyway.

Like 80% of the world uses Android though.

Then isn't Google Keep roughly the Android equivalent?

YUP.

https://list2go.io/en/

What's this one missing?

My wife and I are using https://shared-lists.com mainly for shopping. Free, no-login, no-AI checklist app.

I like it. But most of these pro features I will add for free.

When I press “New Checklist” I get a white screen (iOS 18.1).

Thats erroring 429 too many requests

@millhouse1112

I was in a similar situation like you. Nothing seemed to fit and I wrote one myself without a login.

Then I noticed, that it would be nice if my wife had access, too, but that required at least multiple lists.

Then I noticed, that it would be better, if there were lists for her, lists for me and also shared ones (like grocery), but that required some kind of authentication.

I chose QR-Codes / login tokens to solve this and it works pretty good. Seems like it has no login (due to locally stored tokens), but it can at least identify a user.

So, I still think my list[1] is better than others for MY personal purpose, but it is still very incomplete. Maybe it fulfils your needs...?!

1: https://github.com/sandreas/pure-todo

I like the QRCode idea. For lalacheck if the list is private I don't share, if the list is to someone I share it. But makes sense the collection of lists or tasks.

It would be fantastic to add two simple features: 1) task groups (for example, a project) and 2) drag-and-drop reordering of tasks. Then it would be the only task manager one would need.

I like it. Drag and drop/reordering will be added for sure.

I'm going to avoid adding robust features as much as possible. It's not meant to be a Todoist, Trello or others.

I'm using fly.io free plan. I will solve these issues.

At the very least, add the issues to your checklist!

TodoMVC/examples has 40+ open source todo apps written with various popular and obscure frameworks: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples

Whatever happened to pen and paper? To opening a text editor and type your list?

Do we _really_ need an app for that?

I use both. But I can't share and collaborate on both easily.

There are multiple collaborative text editors and document apps.

I don't even like carrying a wallet around these days unless I have to. I don't want to carry 2 more objects on top of that.

Plus I forget my grocery list half the time but never forget my phone.

I only use Postit notes when I'm at the desk strictly for stuff I need to do around it.

Open the notes app on the phone and type your list? Do you need another app for todo items?

That's a good point, I never fully learned Notes. I just like using markdown writing longform stuff and the simplicity of a dedicated todo interface with shortcuts to quickly add them w/ dates etc.

I'm pretty sure this is for simple sharing of probably very ephemeral lists like a shopping list, vacation list, etc. If you got the link, you got the list. I don't think this is meant to replace reminders/tasks apps on android or iPhone

For those who want to give some feedback. Feel free https://lalacheck.canny.io/feedback

Using a UUID for each item might be overkill.

If YouTube can get away with a short 11-character identifier for each video (including private videos), so can you.

It would make the URL a little less cluttered.

Maybe add a simple "pin" function option so you can at least prevent curious people from messing with the list if they somehow obtain the URL?

I gave up on finding a suitable app and just use a jupyter instance on my local server. Every task is a cell and you just delete it when it's finished.

I use a plain text file locally. But my main need is to share it.

This is the kind of stuff you can now simply ask Claude 3.5 Sonnet to build it for you and it will do it, no need to search for one.

And how do you share this brand new app with someone free?

Cloudflare can store this with trivial effort.

I also get white screen when i pres "new". Firefox 132.0 Windows 11.

I misconfigured the rate limiting. 429 should be ok now.

How to raink on top of HN nowadays: Include key words such as "free", "no-login" and "no-AI" in the title.

Why is it only for 7 days available?

It's a free app. I don't want to keep all the data for a long time. Should I increase this? What duration makes sense for you?

If it was purely local (saved on localStorage) it could be stored indefinitely? But then of course it would be hard to share.

Store the state in the URL

But then you have to reshare every modification

Yep. It's a share-first app in a sense.

30 days makes more sense

Also why not make it all client side? When they grab a share link you can convert the text to image, image to base64 to spend to the URL, and when somebody opens the link you ocr it and recreate the list.

base64 isn’t just for images. You can encode text so unsure why you’d need OCR?

Me and my wife make some changes together. Add, remove, check, uncheck. Groceries list, etc.

With this approach we should share the new URL again after each change.

I would try to find data like "tasks over 30 days old never get completed" and tie the decision (and marketing) to something like that.

vi checklist.txt

approach works also with diff, grep, find, git, zip, scp/sftp, rsync, pandoc etc etc

I use vi ~/todo.xit. xit is this text format: https://xit.jotaen.net/

But this app is for other purposes. Me and my wife add house stuff to a shopping list. We don't want an installed app. Or even login before using a simple list.

There are also decent notes apps on android and ios. I use them to checklist my gym workout.

I know. The idea is to share and collaborate on the same checklist. No installed apps. I want to give a direct URL for someone not a play store URL.

Oh I see. Nice project!

https://github.com/sjl/t

Clear — https://apps.apple.com/app/id493136154

Over a decade on, still my favorite “checklist App” for raw simplicity, linear organization, and a thoughtful gesture based UI.

Free. No login. No AI.

Idea: - Local data so I can access my CL without network. - Templates. Start CL from predefined template. - History. Which templates completed when. - Hierarchical items. - Share or export/import. - Logic engine. Some items might not be relevant in some scenarios.

- I like the local first approach. I was already thinking in making all changes local, then syncing after. - I also like the template. I have a checklist that I reuse everyday. Maybe a reset button (to uncheck all items) simply solve this. But the template or gallery is cool. - Hierarchical items or sections would be nice. - Share is simple, just give the link to someone. What import or export formats are you thinking?

This is great!

nice and simple ui design. i like it.

Thanks a lot.

Uh oh. DNS down

16 points and it returns a 429 (Too many requests). I wonder what the avg. factor between HN points and site visits is approximately.

Any link on the HN front page gets flooded with bot traffic.

And I would trust you to know, of surfacing small sites.

People occasionally post numbers and IIRC the front page peaks at ballpark 1 req/s.

I’m not sure why it has to do any requests at all. One would think you could make a todo app with some html, tiny amount of js to store it in local storage.

I want to share lists with others.

State could be easily exported, encoded in base64 and bundled in a shareable link, just like excalidraw does

Got it. But once modified by someone the share link changes.

I think this is good, you gain versioning for free