Goblin Tools: Magic ToDo's Task-Breakdown Mechanism and Pricing Explained

Goblin Tools is a free suite of single-purpose AI utilities — Magic ToDo, Formalizer, Judge, Estimator, Compiler, Professor, Consultant, Taskmaster, and Chef — built specifically for people who hit task paralysis, most explicitly people with ADHD, autism, or other executive-function challenges. The flagship tool, Magic ToDo, takes a vague or overwhelming task and breaks it into smaller, concrete sub-steps, controlled by an adjustable "spiciness" slider that sets how granular the breakdown gets. There's no account required, no integration with calendars or task managers, and no API — each tool is request-and-respond: type something in, get an answer, decide what to do with it yourself.

That's a deliberate design position against the rest of the AI-planning category, not a missing feature. Tools like Sunsama and Motion build guided daily-planning rituals with calendar and task-manager integrations across a dozen platforms; Goblin Tools does none of that. For someone evaluating it, the deciding factor is whether narrow, stateless task-breakdown is the actual bottleneck — knowing what the steps of a task are — as opposed to the broader planning, scheduling, or task-initiation problems that other ADHD-oriented tools are built to solve instead.

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HOW MAGIC TODO'S GRANULARITY CONTROL ACTUALLY WORKS, AND WHAT ELSE IS IN THE SUITE.

A single adjustable parameter, a request-response architecture, and zero persistence define the mechanism.

Magic ToDo's core mechanism is a single controllable variable: the spiciness slider adjusts how many sub-steps a task gets broken into, from a handful of reasonable chunks at low spiciness to a dozen-plus micro-steps — "pick up the sponge," "turn on the hot water faucet" — at maximum. That granularity control is the entire product decision the tool makes; there's no scheduling logic, no priority weighting, no deadline tracking layered on top, because the tool solves exactly one problem: converting a vague task into a visible list of smaller ones.

The rest of the suite follows the same single-purpose pattern. Formalizer rewrites text into a chosen tone; Judge reads a message and estimates the emotional intent behind it; Estimator guesses how long an activity will take; Compiler turns a messy brain dump into an organized action list; Professor explains a confusing concept in plain language. None of these tools remember previous sessions, connect to any other app, or run autonomously — each one processes a single input and returns a single output, with no agent loop deciding what to do next on the user's behalf.

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Component	Mechanism	Function
Magic ToDo	Task breakdown with adjustable "spiciness" slider	Controls how granular the sub-step breakdown gets, low to maximum detail
Formalizer	Tone rewriting	Adjusts text between casual and formal registers
Judge	Tone/intent reading	Estimates the emotional content behind a message
Estimator, Compiler, Professor	Single-purpose text processing	Time estimates, brain-dump organization, plain-language explanations
Architecture	Request-response, no memory	Each tool processes one input and returns one output, no session state
Integrations	None; no API	No calendar, task-manager, or third-party app connections

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WHY "NO INTEGRATIONS" IS THE POINT, AND WHERE THE TOOL'S OWN LIMITS SHOW.

Zero setup and zero data retention are deliberate; the honest gap is that it solves a different problem than task initiation.

The absence of accounts, integrations, and persistence isn't an early-stage limitation waiting to be built out — it's the design that makes the tool usable at the exact moment someone is too overwhelmed to configure anything. No signup and no learning curve mean a person in the middle of task paralysis can open the site, type the task, and get a breakdown in seconds, without the setup friction that guided-planning tools like Sunsama require before they become useful. That trade-off also means Goblin Tools processes text through third-party AI models without storing conversation history or connecting to other accounts — a narrower data footprint than a tool that syncs a person's calendar, task manager, and email to build a daily plan.

The limitation independent reviewers consistently flag is specific: Magic ToDo solves "I don't know what the steps are," not "I know the steps but still can't start." Those are different failure points in task paralysis, and a tool built for the first doesn't automatically help with the second — some reviewers pair Goblin Tools with a separate execution-focused tool for that reason, using Magic ToDo to generate the steps and something else to actually get moving on step one. Worth noting separately: the mobile apps require a small one-time purchase (roughly $3.99) even though the web version is free with no usage limits, because the ongoing AI processing and hosting costs behind both aren't free to Goblin Tools' developer, one-time app-store purchase or not.

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HOW GOBLIN TOOLS' PRICE COMPARES TO GUIDED-PLANNING ALTERNATIVES.

Free-versus-subscription is the whole comparison; Goblin Tools doesn't compete on features with the paid tier of any of these.

Goblin Tools' website has no paid tier at all — every tool is free with no account required. That puts it at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum from calendar-integrated ADHD planning tools, which charge a recurring subscription specifically because they maintain persistent state across a person's calendar, task manager, and daily planning ritual.

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Tool	Model	Price
Goblin Tools	Free, single-purpose, no integrations	Free (web); ~$3.99 one-time (mobile apps)
Todoist	Task manager, natural-language capture	Free tier; Pro $5/mo
Sunsama	Guided daily planning, calendar/task integrations	$20/mo (annual); $25/mo (monthly), 14-day trial, no free tier
Amazing Marvin	Customizable ADHD task system	$6/mo or $39/year, limited free tier

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The price gap tracks a structural difference, not just positioning: Sunsama's subscription pays for maintained integrations across a dozen calendar and task-manager platforms plus a guided daily ritual that runs every day, while Goblin Tools has no ongoing state to maintain per user beyond the single request being processed. Comparing them on price alone misses that they're not substitutes — one manages an entire day, the other breaks down one task at a time.

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THE DECISION RULE FOR EVALUATING GOBLIN TOOLS.

Goblin Tools earns a place in someone's toolkit specifically for the moment a task feels too big or too vague to start — that's the one problem the spiciness slider is built to solve, and it does it with zero setup cost, at no price, whether or not a person ever opens it again. It is not a substitute for a guided daily planner like Sunsama or a scheduling tool like Motion, and treating it as one will disappoint — there's no calendar awareness, no task tracking across days, and no memory of what was broken down yesterday. For task initiation specifically — knowing the steps but still not starting — Goblin Tools' own limitation is honest: that's a different mechanism than task breakdown, and pairing it with a dedicated execution tool, rather than expecting Magic ToDo to solve both problems, is what several long-term users end up doing once the gap becomes clear.

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