Project and task management decision
Amazing Marvin
A small team or capable engineer can reproduce the core task-management, day-planning, focus mode, and timers within a week and maintain it cheaply; the vendor's large catalogue of highly tuned features, native apps, and community offerings are what you'd lose.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Create tasks, schedule/plan a day, enter focus mode with one-task view, run a Pomodoro timer, mark tasks complete/track time.
What it still won’t have
- 300+ customizable settings and 100+ built-in features
- Native Mac/Windows/iOS/Android apps shipped by vendor
- Community support channels (Facebook, Discord, Reddit) and vendor-run workshops
- Built-in importers for many third-party apps and editors
- Paid support and the vendor's roadmap/updates
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-tenant web productivity app using React (Next.js), Node.js (Express), and Postgres. Implement: user auth (email+password), task CRUD with hierarchical projects and attributes (urgency, energy, estimate), a day-planner view to assign tasks to today and compute capacity, a focus mode that shows one task and a Pomodoro timer (start/stop), and basic time-tracking per task with a report page. Out of scope: native mobile/desktop clients, 300+ user-customizable settings, paid billing/subscriptions, third-party importers beyond CSV. Require input validation, server-side error handling, JWT-based sessions, and unit/integration tests for API endpoints and core UI flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score89
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAmazing Marvin — official product
- official pricingAmazing Marvin Pricing
- official docsAmazing Marvin Features
- open sourcemakeplane/plane
- open sourcechrisvel/tududi
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
