Introducing Dongu: the to-do list that cheers you on

Dongu is live at todongu.com. It's a task manager and daily planner that runs in any modern browser, and I built it because the apps I kept quitting were all good at recording what I owed and bad at making me want to look.

A to-do list is a place you open many times a day. If every visit greets you with a wall of overdue items, you stop visiting, and the app has failed even though every task it stored is still right there. Dongu is my attempt at the other half of the problem.

Why another to-do app

I've abandoned more to-do apps than I can comfortably count, always the same way: an enthusiastic first week, a missed day, a growing pile of overdue items, then a quiet uninstall. Afterwards I'd remember the list was still out there somewhere, keeping records.

Those apps were built like ledgers. Precise, neutral, and unbothered by whether I came back. Nothing in them suggested that finishing something mattered.

Dongu answers instead. Complete a task and the check draws itself in, a soft chime plays, and XP counts up. Milestones bring confetti. A to-do list is still a to-do list underneath all that, but how it feels to use is what decides whether you're still using it in three months.

Meet the penguin

Every screen in Dongu is shared with a small penguin. Let tasks pile up and it droops. Work through them and it perks up. It never nags and it won't talk to you; it reacts to your progress, which turns a count of open items into something you can read without counting.

Dongu is built by one developer and, as the brand joke goes, supervised by one penguin. That's the entire company.

What's inside

Under the cheerfulness there's a full planner. Tasks carry notes, due dates, priorities, color-coded categories, tags, icons, estimated minutes, subtasks, and optional reminders. Add a task from anywhere with the quick-add shortcut (press q), dictate one by voice on supported browsers, or make it recur daily, weekly, monthly or every N days, in which case completing it creates the next occurrence for you. Finished tasks go to the archive rather than the bin, so your history stays intact.

The same tasks come in three views: a list, a kanban board with customizable columns and drag and drop, and a month calendar. Nothing at signup asks you to commit to a methodology. Pick the view that suits the work today and switch when the work changes shape.

Around that core sit the daily-life pieces. Habits get a weekly target and a Monday-to-Sunday grid you tap to check off days. A wellness log tracks water, steps, calories, sleep, exercise and mood, autosaving as you type. A focus timer runs pomodoro-style sessions with durations you configure and can link to the task you're working on, and focus rooms let you invite friends and compare focus minutes on a live weekly or monthly ranking.

There are countdowns with a live days-hours-minutes-seconds ticker, shared boards where you and invited friends assign tasks to each other, including a mode that gives everyone their own copy, and statistics that break your completions down by week, month, year, weekday, hour and category.

XP ties it together. Tasks pay 10, habit checks 5, completed focus sessions 15, the daily wellness log 5, and each of the 13 achievements adds 25 more when it unlocks. Levels need progressively more XP, a streak counts consecutive days with any XP-earning action, and weekly challenges reset every Monday. Daily caps keep the numbers honest, so the system pays you for showing up and not for gaming a counter.

The trial and the founder offer

Every account starts with a 15-day free trial: full access to everything, no credit card. When the trial ends the account turns read-only. Your data stays visible and we never delete it, and you can export it whenever you like.

Because Dongu is new, the first 1000 subscribers get the founder price of $1 per month or $10 per year, kept for as long as the subscription stays active. After that the standard price is $5 per month or $50 per year. You pick monthly or yearly at checkout, Paddle handles payments as the merchant of record, and you can cancel any time and keep access until the end of the paid period. The finer points are in the trial and subscription guide.

What's ahead

Dongu runs in any modern browser and installs as a PWA, so it can live on your phone's home screen today. Native Android and iOS apps are in development and not yet available, so the web app is the way in for now. Beyond that, what early users ask for shapes the roadmap, and a one-person company gets to steer quickly.

Try it

If this sounds like the kind of list you'd keep, create an account and see. The trial runs 15 days, asks for no card, and starts you off with an empty list and a chime you haven't earned yet.