# Cross-Cutting Trends and Success Factors, 2024-2026

This document is a broad first pass on market-wide forces shaping task-management, kanban, and productivity software — market size and where the money is, the AI wave and what stuck, the local-first/data-ownership movement, pricing-model shifts, distribution channels, notable shutdowns and consolidation, and how "tools for thought" apps are eating into task management. It is cross-cutting by design; it does not attempt deep competitor profiles (see 02-04) or a deep dive on AI agents consuming task state (see 06-agents-and-tasks.md).

Researched: 2026-08-01

## Market size and where the money is

Market-research firms disagree on absolute numbers but agree on the shape: a multi-billion-dollar market growing at roughly 14-16% CAGR. Grand View Research puts task-management software at $3.94B in 2025 heading to $12.34B by 2033 (15.6% CAGR); another estimate has it at $5.1B in 2025 to $5.87B in 2026 (15.2% CAGR); a third puts 2025 at $5.71B heading to $19.84B by 2034 (14.84% CAGR). ([Grand View Research](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/task-management-software-market-report), [Business Research Insights](https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/task-management-software-market-119895))

Cloud-based deployment accounts for over 65% of the market, and North America holds over 36% of revenue share. Growth drivers cited across reports are consistent: remote/hybrid work, real-time collaboration demand, and — increasingly — AI/automation integration as a named growth driver in its own right, not just a feature checkbox. ([Grand View Research](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/task-management-software-market-report))

Where the money concentrates is visible in the disclosed revenue of the category leaders, and it is overwhelmingly team/enterprise-seat revenue, not individual subscriptions: Notion reports ~$600M ARR in 2025 (up from $300M in 2024) at an $11B valuation with 100M+ users, reportedly grown with $0 in meaningful paid advertising; ClickUp reports ~$300M ARR (2025/2026) at a $4B valuation, publicly targeting $1B ARR, with 400% YoY AI-sales growth and 800% YoY AI-usage growth cited in its own materials. ([Latka — Notion](https://getlatka.com/companies/notion), [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/notion-and-growing-into-your-10b-valuation-a-masterclass-in-patience), [Latka — ClickUp](https://getlatka.com/companies/clickup))

By contrast, individual-focused indie tools top out one to two orders of magnitude smaller: Sunsama, a well-regarded premium daily planner, reports ~$1.5M ARR (2024) on a ~9-person team, having raised only $2.75M total and reaching profitability off that base in 2022. ([Latka — Sunsama](https://getlatka.com/companies/sunsama)) Obsidian is the outlier that proves the local-first/individual model can still produce real money: ~1.5M monthly active users (22% YoY growth as of Feb 2026), ~$25M ARR, $350M valuation, built by an 18-person team with zero VC funding. ([Fueler](https://fueler.io/blog/obsidian-usage-revenue-valuation-growth-statistics), [ARR Club](https://www.arr.club/obsidian/obsidian-arr-hit-25m-and-350m-valuation-with-just-9-persons))

Pricing-tier data reinforces the same pattern from the buyer side: most per-seat task tools cluster in an "Economy" $10-19/seat/month tier, "Professional" $19-77.50, and "Enterprise" $77.50+ — i.e., the addressable revenue per team scales with headcount, which is exactly why enterprise/team products (Notion, ClickUp, Monday, Asana) dwarf individual tools in ARR even when individual tools have devoted userbases. **Implication for Lanework**: the big money is in team seats, but that market is saturated and AI-feature-arms-raced; the individual/small-team, ownership-oriented segment is smaller in aggregate ARR but has at least one proof point (Obsidian) that a lean, non-VC team can build a durable, sizable business there without competing on the enterprise axis at all.

## The AI wave: what stuck vs what's gimmick

Three distinct AI feature categories are landing differently with users:

**Auto-scheduling AI (Motion, Clockwise, Reclaim)** — genuinely useful for a narrow persona (solo founders/execs with calendar chaos) but has proven commercially fragile at the company level, not just the feature level. Motion ($29-49/mo individual, $99/3 seats) is well-reviewed for "actually doing things, not just suggesting them" and is explicitly positioned for busy founders/freelancers, not general task management. ([Efficient App](https://efficient.app/apps/motion)) Clockwise, despite serving 40,000 organizations including Uber, Netflix, and Atlassian, was shut down entirely on March 27, 2026 when its team was acquihired into Salesforce Agentforce — all user data deleted, ~1 week's notice given, users routed to Reclaim.ai as the closest replacement. This is a cautionary tale about auto-scheduling specifically: it's a feature that large platforms want to absorb into an "agentic calendar" story rather than a standalone business that survives independently. ([Reclaim](https://reclaim.ai/blog/clockwise-shutdown-news), [usecarly.com](https://www.usecarly.com/blog/clockwise-shut-down/))

**Natural-language capture (Todoist Ramble, Task Assist)** — this is the AI feature category with the clearest "stuck" signal. Todoist's Ramble voice-capture feature (launched Jan 2026 after an Oct-Dec 2025 beta) improved end-to-end task-creation success from 40% to 62% over its beta and handles 40 languages; independent testing of Todoist's NLP found it correctly parsed 185/200 free-text task descriptions without user correction. Users describe it as "more capable than basic dictation... because it understands context." ([Skywork](https://skywork.ai/skypage/en/todoist-ai-assistant-alternatives/2035949431685529600)) This is the AI feature type most directly relevant to a kanban tool like Lanework — low-friction capture that reduces the "opening the app" tax — and the evidence is that users adopt it readily when it works, unlike auto-scheduling which requires trusting AI with judgment calls.

**Summarization / subtask generation / AI chat (Notion AI, ClickUp AI)** — high usage-metric growth (ClickUp cites 45% AI-adoption growth in 2024 and 800% YoY AI-usage growth) but murkier signal on whether it's driving retention or just inflating engagement dashboards; reviews describe it as useful for teams already embedded in the platform ("a natural extension of workflow") rather than a reason to switch platforms. Sentiment comparisons show Notion and ClickUp at parity on ease-of-use (75% positive) with no clear AI-driven differentiation reported by third-party review aggregators. ([Capterra comparison](https://www.capterra.com/compare/158833-186596/ClickUp-vs-Notion))

**Agentic AI ("AI agents managing tasks")** is the emerging 2026 frontier, not yet a proven-stuck feature for consumer task apps. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise apps will ship task-specific AI agents by end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025, and 52% of gen-AI-using enterprises already have agents in production somewhere. ([Gartner](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-08-26-gartner-predicts-40-percent-of-enterprise-apps-will-feature-task-specific-ai-agents-by-2026-up-from-less-than-5-percent-in-2025)) This is an enterprise-software statistic, not a personal-productivity-app statistic — it signals where big platforms (Salesforce/Agentforce absorbing Clockwise) are pointed, but there's no comparable adoption evidence yet for individual/small-team kanban tools. The more concrete, bottom-up version of "AI agents + tasks" is happening in developer tooling (see below and 06-agents-and-tasks.md), not in mainstream productivity apps.

**Net read**: capture/parsing AI has stuck because it removes friction without requiring trust; summarization AI is used but not obviously a retention driver; full delegation/auto-scheduling AI is high-value for a narrow persona but commercially unstable as a standalone product category (both Clockwise and, per the Height case below, ambitious "autonomous project management" pivots have failed to sustain independent businesses).

## Local-first / privacy / data-ownership

The Ink & Switch "local-first software" essay (2019) remains the movement's foundational reference; it now has real conference infrastructure behind it — Local-First Conf launched May 2024 in Berlin with speakers from Linear and Anytype, plus a LoFi Berlin 2025 follow-on event, indicating the ideas have moved from essay to community/ecosystem. ([Ink & Switch](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/))

Obsidian is the strongest evidence the philosophy converts to a real business: 1.5M+ MAU (22% YoY growth), ~$25M ARR, $350M valuation, 18 people, zero VC funding, low opex specifically because local-first architecture means no server/storage cost scaling with users. 110,000+ Discord members and 2,000+ community plugins signal an unusually durable, high-engagement community for a note-taking tool. ([Fueler](https://fueler.io/blog/obsidian-usage-revenue-valuation-growth-statistics))

Demand-side evidence: an analysis of 9,300+ Reddit "I wish there was an app that..." posts found 640+ posts (7% of all requests) specifically asking for local-first, self-hosted, or fully-offline tools — framed by users as wanting "control, reliability, and avoiding subscription fatigue" more than privacy per se, and wanting to "own outright" rather than rent. Notably, that analysis found no specific mentions of kanban or markdown-format requests within the local-first bucket — the demand signal is broad ("modern versions of classic desktop apps without mandatory cloud") rather than kanban-specific, which is a mild caution against over-reading a ready-made audience for Lanework's exact format. ([digitalbiztalk.com](https://digitalbiztalk.com/article/what-9300-reddit-posts-reveal-about-app-gaps-in-2026))

Open-source/local-first "tools for thought" competitors for mindshare in this space include Anytype (IPFS-based P2P sync, end-to-end encrypted, $13.5-29M raised, 43 employees) and AFFiNE (open-core, $6.75-7.99/mo cloud tier, $10/seat team tier, free self-host capped at 3 users). Both are VC-funded open-core plays rather than bootstrapped like Obsidian — a different local-first business model worth noting: open-source-with-paid-cloud-sync as the monetization wedge. ([fahimai.com](https://www.fahimai.com/anytype), [AFFiNE blog](https://affine.pro/blog/affine-vs-appflowy-vs-anytype))

Failure/near-failure case: Muse ("tool for thought" for iPad/Mac, local-first sync) hit unsustainable unit economics in mid-to-late 2023 — most of the team left, one developer continued, and the product was later relaunched/rebranded as Allume in 2024 with collaboration features added. The lesson generally drawn (including in the project's own HN retrospective) is that local-first sync engineering is expensive and hard to monetize thinly — being local-first doesn't exempt a product from needing a viable business model. ([HN: Muse Retrospective](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359893), [localfirst.fm interview](https://www.localfirst.fm/20/transcript))

## Pricing-model trends

Subscription fatigue is a named, widely-discussed 2025 consumer trend, and one-time-purchase is reported as "returning even when [it isn't] the cheapest option," valued by users for control/predictability and by indie developers for reduced platform dependence. ([influencers-time.com](https://www.influencers-time.com/subscription-fatigue-in-2025-why-one-time-buys-dominate/))

Things 3 remains the reference case for the one-time-purchase model in the exact macOS-native indie category Lanework sits in: $49.99 Mac / $9.99 iPhone / $19.99 iPad / $29.99 Vision Pro, no subscription tier at all, multiple Apple Design Awards, 4.8/5 across 27,750+ App Store ratings as of July 2026. The one recurring criticism is that per-platform pricing feels fragmented versus a single bundle — but reviewers note users still prefer that fragmentation to a subscription. ([ellieplanner.com](https://ellieplanner.com/productivity-copilot/things-3-pricing), [richardriviere.com](https://richardriviere.com/things-3-pricing))

At the other end, per-seat SaaS pricing is under visible strain in the team-tool segment: standard per-seat rates ($10-15/user/month across Monday/Asana/ClickUp/Teamwork) scale painfully with headcount (a 20-person team pays $220-300/mo), and per-seat costs are cited as a structural adoption blocker in enterprises needing broad cross-team visibility. This is driving a flat-rate counter-trend (e.g., Basecamp's flat $349/mo, which beats per-seat pricing once a team crosses ~75 people) and hybrid models (seat-plus-usage) for tools 3+ years in market. ([thickethq.com](https://www.thickethq.com/blog/flat-rate-project-management), Celoxis pricing guide)

Premium individual-tier daily planners (Sunsama $17-22/mo, Akiflow $14.90-34/mo) show the subscription model still works at the high end of individual productivity tooling when the product sells a habit/ritual, not just software — Sunsama's pitch is explicitly the "done for the day" daily-review ritual as the retained value, not feature count. ([lifestack.ai](https://lifestack.ai/blog/sunsama-planner-pricing), [thebusinessdive.com](https://thebusinessdive.com/akiflow-vs-sunsama))

Setapp remains a live secondary distribution/monetization channel for indie Mac developers: Setapp Membership takes ~10% and pools 20% of subscription revenue to partner developers by usage; standalone single-app distribution through Setapp takes ~25% (still lower than typical app-store cuts). Setapp's own 2025 developer survey found only 20% of surveyed Mac developers distribute exclusively via the Mac App Store — most indie Mac devs now run multi-channel distribution. ([Computerworld / Setapp survey](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3621224/setapp-survey-reveals-what-mac-developers-are-thinking-about-right-now.html), [setapp.com/developers](https://setapp.com/developers))

## Distribution and growth

Concrete, sourced detail on exactly which channels move the needle for productivity apps specifically was thin in this pass (this is a good candidate for deeper, narrower research later — e.g. pulling specific Product Hunt leaderboard entries and r/macapps threads directly rather than via aggregator commentary). What is corroborated:

- Product Hunt remains an active launch venue for productivity/AI tools specifically, but generic "best practices" content (Tuesday/Wednesday ~3am PST launches, hunter partnerships) dominates the available sources over concrete named 2025-2026 productivity-app launch case studies. ([Product Hunt 2026 categories](https://www.producthunt.com/categories/productivity))
- r/macapps is confirmed as an active, relevant community for Mac utility discovery, with the standard indie-marketing advice being to participate/contribute before pitching.
- Notion's growth to $600M ARR / 100M+ users is repeatedly cited as achieved with "$0 in meaningful paid advertising" — i.e., organic/content/community-led growth at the very largest scale in this market, which is directionally consistent with (though not proof of) productivity tools being unusually word-of-mouth/creator-driven relative to other SaaS categories. ([ehroo.com case study](https://ehroo.com/case-studies/notion-organic-growth-case-study))
- Sunsama's growth strategy is documented concretely: a 600+-member "owned influencer/ambassador community" built over four years, credited with contributing a significant share of annual revenue, plus organic screenshot-sharing of its "done for the day" completion screen as an unprompted word-of-mouth loop. This is a specific, replicable-sounding playbook for a premium individual productivity tool. ([getsaral.com](https://www.getsaral.com/customer-stories/sunsama))
- YouTube productivity creators (Ali Abdaal, 5.5M+ subscribers; Thomas Frank) function as de facto top-of-funnel for Notion and Todoist specifically — both creators build content and paid courses around these tools, and both are cited as recommending Notion for structured work and Todoist for task tracking. This channel appears to matter more for note-taking/PKM tools (Notion, Obsidian) than for kanban specifically. ([Medium roundup](https://medium.com/@kaivalshah/what-ive-learned-from-productivity-youtubers-ali-abdaal-thomas-frank-and-matt-d-avella-8afe3a929bdb))

**Gap flagged for a follow-up pass**: none of the sources found gave a concrete, named recent (2025-2026) HN/Product Hunt launch case study for a kanban or file-based task app with real numbers (upvotes, signups, revenue) — worth a targeted narrow-pass search later, e.g. searching HN/PH directly rather than through SEO aggregator commentary.

## Consolidation and failures, 2024-2026

| Product | What happened | When | Why (as reported) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clockwise | Shut down entirely; team acquihired into Salesforce Agentforce; all user data deleted | Announced ~mid-March 2026, dead March 27, 2026 | Platform (Salesforce) wanted the autonomous-scheduling team/IP for its own agentic product, not the standalone business |
| Height | Full project-management app shut down | Announced March 28, 2025; final day Sept 24, 2025 | $18.3M raised (incl. $14M Series A, 2021), 7 years old; couldn't out-compete Linear despite "stunning design" and a late pivot toward autonomous PM; generic shutdown messaging drew criticism for lack of transparency |
| Rise Calendar | Shut down | Users told to export by March 31, 2025 | Company closure after 4+ years |
| Mayday (calendar) | Shut down after acquisition | All services ended May 5, 2024 | Acquired, then terminated rather than integrated |
| Amie | Not shut down, but pivoted away from its calendar/task core toward AI meeting notes as the headline feature | Through 2025 | Calendar/task side effectively deprioritized in favor of the AI notetaking bet |
| Muse | Near-failure, not full shutdown: team shrank drastically, later relaunched/rebranded as Allume | Mid-late 2023 unsustainability; Allume relaunch late 2024 | Local-first sync product with unit economics that couldn't sustain the original team size |

Sources: ([Reclaim on Clockwise](https://reclaim.ai/blog/clockwise-shutdown-news), [usecarly.com](https://www.usecarly.com/blog/clockwise-shut-down/), [Creativerly on Height](https://www.creativerly.com/height-app-is-shutting-down/), [AlternativeTo on Rise](https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/1/rise-calendar-is-shutting-down-users-are-urged-to-export-their-data-by-march-31-2025), [AlternativeTo on Mayday](https://alternativeto.net/news/2024/4/mayday-calendar-app-announces-acquisition-and-upcoming-termination-of-all-services), [skywork.ai on Amie](https://skywork.ai/blog/amie-review-2025-calendar-tasks-ai-meeting-notes/), [HN Muse Retrospective](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359893))

What did *not* consolidate or fail, contrary to a plausible assumption going in: Superlist (the Wunderlist successor) is still operating and expanding — it merged with Fragment Software in June 2025 rather than shutting down, and Trello (Atlassian, acquired 2017 for $425M) remains an active 50M+-user product with no signs of sunset. ([PitchBook on Superlist](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/436263-04), [sqmagazine on Trello](https://sqmagazine.co.uk/trello-statistics/))

**Pattern across the failures**: none of the notable 2024-2026 shutdowns were bootstrapped/indie products — Height ($18.3M raised), Clockwise (well-funded, acquihired), Rise, and Mayday were all VC-funded companies that either ran out of runway trying to out-feature a category leader (Height vs. Linear) or got absorbed into a bigger platform's agentic-AI roadmap (Clockwise into Salesforce). This is a mild positive signal for a small, low-burn indie approach: the failures cluster in "raised money, needed hypergrowth or an acquirer, didn't get either" — a dynamic a self-funded native Mac app with no VC runway clock doesn't face in the same way.

## "Tools for thought" eating task management

Notion, Tana, and Capacities represent a real convergence trend where PKM/notes tools are absorbing task management as one more "block type" or "object" rather than leaving it to dedicated apps. Tana specifically markets itself as ending "context switching between tools" by combining free-flowing notes, structured data, and — per its own positioning — working "especially well for tasks, projects, research, and meeting-heavy workflows," using an AI-native outliner/knowledge-graph model. Capacities takes a similar "everything is a connected object" approach as a Notion alternative. ([Ness Labs on Tana](https://nesslabs.com/tana-review), [xda-developers](https://www.xda-developers.com/i-found-a-notion-obsidian-and-capacities-killer-and-im-absolutely-thrilled/))

For a dedicated kanban/task tool like Lanework, this is a real competitive pressure at the low end (a Notion or Tana user may simply never feel the need for a separate task app, since the notes tool already "does tasks fine") but it is also a differentiation opportunity: these all-in-one tools are, without exception, cloud-native, app-mediated, and not filesystem-transparent — a Tana or Notion task doesn't exist as a file you can open in a text editor, diff in git, or hand to an arbitrary AI agent via the filesystem. Lanework's plain-folder-and-Markdown model is structurally incompatible with the "everything is a database object in our proprietary graph" approach these tools are converging on, which is a real point of difference rather than a feature gap to close.

## Adjacent and directly relevant: markdown/git-native kanban for AI coding agents

This surfaced unprompted while researching the AI-agent angle and is worth flagging prominently because it validates part of Lanework's core thesis from an unexpected direction: there is an active, fast-moving 2025-2026 niche of markdown-file-based, git-native kanban/task tools built specifically for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI) to read and write task state directly as plain files, with a human-usable kanban view layered on top. Examples found: **Backlog.md** (tasks as `.md` files with YAML frontmatter in a git repo, zero-config CLI, explicitly designed so "Claude, please take over task 33" works, plus a terminal/web kanban view — "nearly all of Backlog.md's own code is written by AI agents working through Backlog.md itself"), **Kanban-md** (Show HN, Feb 2026, "no server, no DB, no API tokens"), **Kanban CLI** (Rust, Show HN June 2026), **VS Code Agent Kanban** (Show HN, persistent markdown task files with `[user]`/`[agent]` conversation-log markers committed alongside code), **AgentsBoard**, **Agent Kanban**, and **AgentsRoom**. ([GitHub: Backlog.md](https://github.com/MrLesk/Backlog.md), [HN: Kanban-md](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46957653), [HN: Kanban CLI](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256520), [HN: VS Code Agent Kanban](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47307169))

This niche is distinct from Lanework's positioning but adjacent enough to matter directly: these tools validate that "plain Markdown files as the task-state source of truth, readable/writable by both humans and AI agents" is a real, actively-growing pattern with multiple independent implementations converging on it in the same 18-month window — not a niche idea unique to Lanework. The difference is audience and surface: these are developer-CLI/git-repo tools aimed at orchestrating coding agents inside a single repo, not native GUI kanban apps aimed at a general "boards are folders on disk" personal/team workflow with a first-class macOS UI. Lanework sits at the intersection of this validated agent-file-format pattern and the native-app-quality-bar end of the market that these CLI-first tools don't attempt to serve — worth a closer, dedicated look in 06-agents-and-tasks.md.

## Open questions for later, narrower passes

- Concrete named Product Hunt / HN launch case studies for kanban or file-based task apps specifically, with real traction numbers (this pass only found generic "how to launch" content).
- Whether the Backlog.md/Kanban-md/Agent-Kanban cluster has any user overlap or awareness of native GUI tools like Lanework, or whether the two remain in totally separate discovery funnels (git/CLI users vs. Mac App Store/Setapp users).
- A harder look at Superlist's post-Fragment-merger direction, since it's the closest thing to a "modern Wunderlist" and is actively expanding rather than consolidating.
- Reddit/App Store review mining specifically for kanban-format (not just PKM/notes) local-first demand, since the 9,300-post analysis found no kanban-specific signal within its local-first bucket.
