Isaiah Centifanto— solo developer
I built MarkTodo because I wanted a todo manager that lived inside my notes,
not next to them. Every “Markdown-friendly” app I tried still treated the
Markdown as an export format — something to spit out on the way to its own
database, its own sync, its own account. I wanted the opposite: a checkbox in
a .md file that stays exactly that, however you open it, forever.
Where the six came from
Backlog, Warming, Doing, Blocked, Paused, Done. I came up with those six — the set, the names, the order, and the split between the three you plan with and the three that mean work is live. They came out of a lot of late nights trying to make a workflow that was short enough to hold in your head and still said something useful about every todo in it.
Five of the six exist somewhere, under some name. Warming does not. There is a real state between “someday” and “in flight” — the thing you have decided is next but have not started — and every other tool makes you fake it with an invented tag, a fake due date, or a saved search you maintain by hand. Giving it a glyph means the decision gets made once and then stays made, in the file.
The other one I care about is that Blocked and Paused are not the same thing. Most tools collapse both into one “on hold” and you lose the only distinction that matters: somebody else stopped this, versus I stopped this. So Blocked stays in the active half, where you have to look at it, and Paused drops back to the planning half and out of your day.
The names are fixed, deliberately. A Doing heading has to
mean the same thing in every vault, on every device, in both programs —
otherwise the vocabulary is just another settings screen, and a vocabulary
nobody shares is not worth learning.
An app, not a plugin on a phone
Almost every todo plugin for Obsidian is a plugin and nothing else. Off the desktop you get whatever your note app happens to give you, and the handful that do have a mobile story are the desktop plugin shrunk down — sidebars, dense panels, hover menus, on a screen you are holding in one hand.
So I built a real Android app, and I built it around the phone instead of around the plugin. Its three panes — your projects, your list, the todo you are in — sit side by side and slide rather than stack, so the list never disappears and you never have to press Back to work out where you are. I believe in that enough that MarkTodo’s own plugin starts in Lightweight mode on a phone and points you at the app.
MT is Montana, twice
The initials aren’t only MarkTodo’s — Montana’s postal abbreviation is the same two letters, and that’s not an accident. I live and build here. The mark is two faceted obsidian peaks standing in for an M, with the ridge between them quietly folding into a checkmark: the M is Montana and MarkTodo at once, the checkmark is the app, and obsidian is doing double duty — it’s the volcanic glass the color palette is built from, and a nod to the note-taking app MarkTodo lives inside.
One person, not a company
MarkTodo is built by me, alone. I also run Integritas — CTO-level strategy and the AI, automation, and infrastructure work behind it — and serve as VP of Data & Technology at Montana Spaceport & Test Range. Between the three, updates here land when I have the hours for them, not on a schedule — but every stubborn decision in MarkTodo, including no accounts and no sync service, is one I actually hold, not one a product meeting arrived at.
Free, with a Pro unlock to come
The Obsidian plugin and the Android app are both free to install, in full — nothing about MarkTodo is held back behind a wall. The app will carry a one-time Pro unlock once it is built: no subscription, no account, no feature counted against you, and buying it will be the most direct way to fund the time that goes into both programs.
Until then, if MarkTodo is worth something to you, Buy Me a Coffee does the same job with none of the commitment.
What doesn’t change
None of this changes what’s on the privacy page: no account, no server, nothing collected, because there’s nowhere built to send it. Support keeps the lights on. It doesn’t unlock a different set of promises.