Why we went back to private beta

If you tried to sign up over the summer and found a waitlist instead, this one's for you. In July we closed the public beta and went back to private testing. We kept getting asked for the same two things, often enough that putting them off any longer would have been daft.

The two requests

The first was native apps. The web app works well on a desktop, but a task manager lives or dies on how quickly you can get a thought into it, and "open a browser tab on your phone" loses that race every time. People wanted Irkless on their Mac, in their pocket and on their wrist.

The second was subtasks. Plenty of tasks are really three small tasks wearing a trench coat, and without a way to break them down people were either creating throwaway projects or cramming checklists into the notes. Both work. Neither is pleasant.

We could have kept the public beta running and bolted these on around it, but both reach right into the data model and the sync layer - exactly the bits we least wanted to be changing underneath people's live task lists. So we went back to a smaller group, who knew what they'd signed up for, while we did the heavy lifting.

Where things stand

Both are approaching completion. Subtasks are in daily use across the web app and the terminal app, and the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps are in private beta now. They'll be available when we come out of private beta, or very soon after.

Once we're happy with how it all hangs together, we'll most likely open a fresh public beta rather than going straight to a full launch - new apps deserve the same shakedown the web app got.

Same price

None of this has changed the price. It's still $6 a month or $60 a year, with every feature and every app included. The native apps aren't an add-on and subtasks aren't a premium tier - there is no premium tier. And if you signed up during the first public beta, the 20% lifetime discount we promised you still stands.

A few things that arrived early

While the big two were in progress, some features we'd planned for later releases turned out to be ready sooner than expected, so they'll be in the initial release too.

Connect your AI assistant (MCP)

Irkless has an MCP server, so you can connect an AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and the like) to your account and ask it to capture, organise, schedule and review tasks for you. You approve the connection the same way you would with any app sign-in, you can revoke it from your account settings whenever you like, and anything it changes syncs to your other devices like any other edit. It can't empty your trash or permanently delete anything - an assistant can tidy up after itself, but it can't make things disappear.

Colour cues for areas

Give an area a colour and it carries through to that area and its projects, so you know where you are at a glance rather than by squinting at the sidebar. This one came from users who lean on colour to orient themselves - dyslexic and other neurodivergent folk in particular - and it turns out to be nice for everyone else too.

Tag mirrors

A tag used to live in exactly one place in the hierarchy, which is awkward when it genuinely belongs in two. Mirrors let one tag appear under several parents - docker under both devops and backend, say - and filtering by either parent picks it up, just as if the tag lived there. Keep your real tags wherever they're quickest to find, and build as many category trees around them as you need.

Recurring tasks, reworked

Recurring tasks were one of the rougher corners of the public beta, and I said as much at the time. They've been rebuilt. You can change the repeat rule from any occurrence, a repeating task's subtasks come back as a fresh checklist each time, and Upcoming shows the next occurrence faded out with its rhythm next to it, so you can see what's coming without it cluttering today.

Until then

If you're on the waitlist, thanks for your patience - you'll hear from us when the doors open again. If you were part of the first public beta, thank you for the bug reports and the nagging; most of what's above exists because you asked for it.