One person, 23 days, 22 releases: OpenTodo's stars came one door at a time

A self-hosted Todoist isn't a new idea; GitHub has a long list of projects that do it. OpenTodo reached 27 stars in 305 days after creating the repo, without ever hitting Hacker News, GitHub trending, or a big account's repost. Its stars climb a dozen or two a day, and two things made that possible: first, the author had AI write the code from a well-defined spec, releasing faster than one person should be able to; second, he covered every distribution channel in the self-hosting community, one by one. The playbook is copyable, but don't build another to-do app.

A post titled "Stop renting your to-do list"

On Oct 11, 2026, developer Raffaele Pizzari (pixari on GitHub, LinkedIn profile based in Germany) published a post on his blog titled "Stop renting your to-do list". The opening paragraph says: good to-do apps usually charge a few euros a month, for as long as you use them; your tasks sit on someone else's server, and if you switch apps, recurring rules and history often get lost too. The last line: "version 0.1.0 came out today."

The demo in the post types one line into the quick-add box, "Call Sarah next Wed 3pm #work @call p1 +30m", and the date, time, project, label, priority, and 30-minute estimate are all recognized at once. It works without a connection and supports six languages. This is the feature people love most about Todoist, just running on your own machine.

11 days later he wrote on LinkedIn: "I mentioned it on Reddit without expecting much. Lots of people wrote to me saying they had the same problem and were looking for the same thing." By Nov 3, it had shipped to 0.22.0.

What it is

A to-do and task management app you can run on your own server. AGPL open source, free, no paid tier. The server is a Go program of about 23MB, all data lives in one SQLite file, it uses about 20MB of RAM when idle, and it runs on a Raspberry Pi. A single docker run, with no environment variables to configure.

The features are built item by item against Todoist: natural-language entry, nested projects, kanban boards, recurring rules written the way you speak ("every last weekday"), push reminders, filtered queries, and dragging tasks onto a weekly calendar. Two things set it apart from other self-hosted to-do apps. First, real offline support: each device keeps a full copy of the data, not a cache, and if two devices edit the same task while offline, the changes merge field by field when they reconnect, with no conflict dialog. Second, multi-user: each person has an account, and projects can be shared with family or a small team as view, edit, or admin. It also has end-to-end encryption, passkeys, single sign-on, CalDAV (syncs with Apple Reminders), and imports from Todoist, TickTick, and Things.

The author also listed the shortcomings himself in his tutorial on noted.lol (at the time it was 0.3): no native app in the app stores, so on phones you can only install the web version; no support for Google Calendar or Google Tasks; tasks can't have attachments.

How the stars grew: a straight line, no spikes

GitHub stars, logged daily. Over the last 7 days, +124; the first 7 days, +97,11-06. The single-day high of +28 is the highest so far, and on that same day the author published "I put my OpenTodo list on an e-ink frame" on dev.to. Whether the two are causally related can't be confirmed. 26 forks.

The curve shows no single day when it went viral. A project that hits the HN front page usually spikes to several hundred stars in a day and then falls back. OpenTodo gains 8 to 28 a day, accelerating gradually but staying very flat. That shape usually means traffic from many small entry points, each steadily adding a little. It went up on Product Hunt with 1 votes on 11-04; the only YouTube hit I found was a Short with 34 views; and the best-known self-hosting newsletter, Self-Host Weekly, did not mention it in issues from October through 11-06.

Where the stars came from: he knocked on every door in the self-hosting community

Reddit, and more than one subreddit. The posts I could find are on r/buildinpublic, r/SideProject (launched around Oct 11), r/sideprojects (0.3), r/homeassistant (about the HA integration), and r/IMadeThis (0.20). He also opened his own r/OpenTodoApp. r/selfhosted only allows new projects in its weekly new-projects thread, so he likely got much of his traffic from there, but I didn't find the specific post or its upvotes (unverified).

Writing his own posts and submitting them himself. 10-12 He published a comparison article on dev.to, "A free, open-source alternative to Todoist, TickTick and Microsoft To Do that you host yourself", naming three commercial products right in the title. 10-15 On the self-hosting tutorial site noted.lol there is an OpenTodo install guide whose first line is "Hi, I'm Raffaele, the developer behind OpenTodo", written by the author himself, later reposted by aggregators such as daily.dev. 10-21 He also wrote "Four small pitfalls of building a local-first task app". Nearly every release came with a blog post.

Filling every install channel was the core move. It's listed in the Unraid community app store and has a one-click Coolify template. The repo's deploy/ directory contains templates for more than a dozen platforms, including CapRover, CasaOS, Dokploy, Easypanel, Fly.io, Helm, Portainer, Render, Runtipi, Synology, TrueNAS, and Umbrel. He also opened an issue with the official TrueNAS app catalog and submitted inclusion requests on PikaPods' feedback board and to ElfHosted. Once there were enough listings, others started writing about it on their own: Marius Hosting, a major Synology site, published a Synology install guide, and several open-source alternative directories added it. People hunting for software in the self-hosting world often browse their NAS app store, so every store he added was another entry point that people kept passing through.

Building integrations to borrow neighbors' traffic. The German smart-home site smarthomeassistent.de 10-27 wrote about the Home Assistant integration. There is also an n8n node, an MCP interface, and a Claude Code plugin. Each new ecosystem integration gave him another post to share in that ecosystem's community.

The README asks for stars directly. The original line: "a star on GitHub helps other people find it".

How one person built 90 features and shipped 22 versions in three weeks

The author 10-14 published "How OpenTodo is built: specs first, then AI agents." The opening notes that for a maintainer, this is a big app, and people often ask how one person could build it. Their workflow: each feature is first written as a spec in OpenSpec, including a proposal, testable behavior scenarios (for example, "two devices edit different fields of the same task, and both edits are kept"), the design, and a breakdown into small tasks. Then an AI coding agent writes the code against the spec. Next it goes through a strict CI (Go and frontend tests, spec validation, mobile layout checks, accessibility checks), and finally a human review before merging. All the specs are public in the repo's openspec/ directory.

This matters more for stars than it looks. Self-hosters fear a project that gets abandoned after they install it. A repo that shipped 22 releases in three weeks, with issue numbers already past nine hundred, makes people feel safe installing it. The speed also let them ship a full feature set from the start, so when they write comparison posts, they have the material to check off features against Todoist one by one.

Who it's competing with

GitHub stars, around 11-06. There's also Nextcloud Tasks (you have to install all of Nextcloud first), plus kanban and project tools like Planka, Wekan, and Plane.

This niche is crowded, but the maker of Vikunja has been at it for 8 years and is only at 6,000 stars, which suggests this category grows slowly on stars anyway. On r/selfhosted, people keep posting "what's the best self-hosted Todoist alternative in 2026, clean UI, with collaboration?" which means the established projects haven't satisfied people. OpenTodo targets exactly this gap: the Todoist experience, plus true offline use, a single file, and zero configuration.

If it were you

Verdict: Copying its playbook is worth doing, but building yet another to-do app is not. What OpenTodo proves is a repeatable way to earn stars: pick a commercial product everyone is paying a subscription for, build an open-source self-hosted version, use AI to ship against specs at high frequency, and fill every self-hosting install channel one by one. The stars it earns have a ceiling and grow linearly, a few hundred a month, not thousands overnight.

Who it's for: Developers who already run a NAS or home server, know Docker and the dozen-odd panel apps, and are willing to ship a release every day, write something every week, and submit to each app store one at a time.

Who it's not for: Anyone after a one-off hit that gets ten thousand stars in a week; anyone who only wants to write code and won't write posts or promote (half this project's effort goes into distribution); anyone planning yet another self-hosted to-do app, since six or seven projects already occupy that road and OpenTodo is still pushing forward on it.

How to do it: Pick a different category. Look for things people keep asking about on r/selfhosted ("is there a self-hosted alternative to X") where the existing open-source options are hard to install or ugly. Bookkeeping, habit tracking, shared family calendars, and reading notes are worth a look to start. Build to the same spec: a single binary plus a single SQLite file, one command to run, zero configuration, offline-capable, multi-user sharing. Write the features as specs in a format like OpenSpec first, then have an agent write the code. At launch, cover the core features of the product you're benchmarking against, then publish a feature-by-feature comparison, with the commercial product's name right in the title.

How to get stars: On launch day, post in r/selfhosted's weekly new-projects thread, r/SideProject, and dev.to. Pitch tutorial sites like noted.lol to write an install guide. In the first week, get templates done and submitted to Unraid, TrueNAS, Synology, CasaOS, Umbrel, and Coolify. With every release, publish a blog post and a thread. Build a Home Assistant or n8n integration, then post it to those communities. Make the README say clearly that starring helps others find it.

When to move: There's no hard deadline; this kind of need comes up every year. But the advantage of "AI writes a complete feature set against specs" is becoming available to everyone, and in six months a full-featured launch will just be the entry ticket. So the earlier you claim a category, the better.

Signs you've misread it: ① OpenTodo's daily new stars drop to single digits over the next month, which means channel-spreading only brings one-time traffic that doesn't stick. ② Its issues start filling with data loss in sync, database corruption on upgrade, and similar problems, which means the cost of high-frequency AI releases is higher than it looks, and self-hosters will count it against the project. ③ Your chosen category has ten-plus channel listings and two weeks after launch you're still under 50 stars, which means that category's demand isn't as urgent as you thought, so switch to the next one.