No, we don't plan to charge for this service after beta.

As for the bills... with money. ;)

Advertising, I assume?

Come on, RTM. You can't expect us to get invested in your service without telling us how you'll get the money to pay the bills.
Until I know that this is a viable on-going business, I won't get too excited about it.

Please let us know what source of income will support this service.

I agree with this. Will you guys be around? Will there be a premium service?

Switching to a new organization system is a big time commitment and one I'm not willing to make unless I'm at least somewhat comfortable with how things will be handled.

The tone of a few of these posts is somewhat amusing. At the moment, RTM is a completely free, zero-advertising service. Why should RTM care if someone chooses not to use their service at this point?

Jim: I assume that RTM wants people talking about and using the service, otherwise why offer it? Therefore, they need to explain how they are going to pay for it? Are they planning on spamming us based on our lists? Selling our contact information? Printing money in their basement? There are a lot of options in this field now-- and, in fact, I already pay for several. Knowing that (1) this service is legit and (2) that it will be here next week would be mildly comforting information to have before I start using the service and *especially* before I sully my good reputation with friends and clients by recommending RTM to them.

Ditto. I signed up because it was required to post a question in the forum, however I don't intend to use this service until I have a better idea of the future terms and plans. In fact, the flippant response has pretty much put me off regardless what I learn in the future.

Guys, it's a frikkin' Task List. What's the big deal if it goes tits up? Use it. Enjoy it. Feel the Ajaxy goodness coursing through your veins. Take maximum benefit while it's there, and if one day it vanishes into the void, MOVE ON!

To the numpty who's worried about being spammed, get a life. If you had half a brain, you'd sign up to services like this with the foresight to use a disposable email address. If you get bombarded with spam, just disable it and MOVE ON!

As for how the RTM guys are going to pay for it, what concern is it of yours? Really, I can't see that a service like this would be TOO expensive to administer. Certainly just looking at this tool at an early stage, it's got potential - you just can't deny that. If a small group of entrepreneurs are stumping up their own personal cash to get this project off the ground, you could say they're brave - but by no means foolish.

Foolish would describe someone who gets their life inextricably tied to a frikkin' online Task List.

Interesting perspective from vikshah although my opinion differs significantly. What is the use of anything if I can't depend on it? Ajaxy goodness aside, I won't bother typing my task list into anything if I can't rely on it to be there for me to use tomorrow. To do so would be silly.

I am willing to support "entrepreneurs" putting out something like RTM. I support them by bearing with the bugs and the klunky UI and so on while the product evolves. But if they don't have a plan to make this profitable or at least sustainable, then to be blunt they're just pissing into the wind.

I, for one, learned something from the 90s. My question to RTM still stands: How will you pay the bills?

Please see our privacy policy for privacy concerns.

It's a free service. It'll remain free after beta.

We've been developing it and paying for it ourselves for more than a year (a significant investment of both time and money). So, we do plan to stick around. :)

Consider this the final reply on the subject. If any of the above makes you feel uncomfortable, you are free not to use the service.

There's a lot free stuff on the Internet. Some people like working hard on stuff which makes other people's lives easier. Take open source software as an example.

So what I hear is that RTM is run by a bunch of kids who like to play with cool stuff. Great, have fun, I hope your trust funds are big. For my purposes, however, RTM is insufficiently secure. Count me out.

Omar-
I think the concern is about sustainability and scalability. It's easy to pay for a pet project when no one is using it, but it gets very difficult when it becomes the next big thing.

del.icio.us is an example. They have received investment dollars recently, and have accordingly been able to scale well. They haven't explained their eventual revenue model yet, but they have investors, which says a lot.

Saying even as little as "We're pursuing funding options" would be adequate to reassure people that you're going to be around a while. Tons of Web2.0 free-service startups, such as Rojo, are doing the same thing. It's not reassuring, though, to hear you say that you've been able to pay for it so far. Obviously, financial scalability is an issue you need to address publicly.

I hope oldman isn't right about RTM.

this is a beta program, and they've opened it publicly such that you're free to try it or not. the fact that i can "own" my data in a number of different ways (atom, ical, etc.) means I don't really "care" if they have a funding model or not.

If they go belly up (hope not!), I have my data (well as of the last sync I perform, realizing that it is in beta).
If they don't, then I'll continue using their service because it works. Because it's currently better than the alternatives.

And, if it sufficiently improves my life I'd probably pay for it. But let's just hope they get bought out like the rest of the Web2.0 and yahoo or google can offer it for free with the stability of a corporation.

if I were a shareholder in a publicly traded RTM, yes I'd be concerned too.
But I'm not.
And neither are you.

I think they will make money by using the data from our task lists to do market research for other firms.

This is a top service, probably the most useful website to me after my email portal. I'll be distraught if it disappears.

Some of the people in this thread are coming across as rather self-important.

As someone else said... it's a task-list. I am not bashing RTM, because I love using it - I'm simply putting things in perspective here. It's a task-list. There have been countless task-lists before, and, if RTM dies, there will be countless more.

Seeing as RTM lets you back up your tasks easily, I just don't see what the big deal is. Considering how things are going, I don't really see RTM dying anytime soon. And if it WERE going to die, I don't think the RTM team would just flip the switch with no warning. They'll give you time to backup your. And that's IF they go belly-up, which I don't think is going to happen.

If people don't want to use RTM because the team doesn't want to publicize how they plan on funding RTM in the future, so be it. Some people can't recognize a good thing when they see it.

Hear! Hear!