Connect Claude or ChatGPT to Your Todo Lists

You can now ask Claude or ChatGPT to read and manage your FreeTodoList lists directly. Add tasks by chat, ask what's overdue, set due dates, mark items done — without leaving the conversation you're already having with the AI.

What you can do

A few of the things that work today:

• What's on my groceries list?
• Add 'pick up the dry cleaning' to my errands list, due Friday at 5pm.
• What todos do I have overdue?
• Mark the report task as complete.
• Reorder my groceries list — put produce first, then dairy.
• Search my lists for anything mentioning 'birthday'.

The assistant connects as you, only sees what your account can see, and every action goes through your normal account permissions. Nothing happens to lists you don't own.

How it works

Under the hood it's the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard that lets AI assistants talk to real services in a structured way. We expose a small set of tools that match what you already do in the FreeTodoList UI:

• See your lists and read their items
• Create lists, add items, set due dates
• Mark complete, mark incomplete, reorder, delete
• Search across everything

The AI calls these tools when you ask it to do something todo-list-related, and reports back what happened. You stay in the chat; the work happens on freetodolist.com under your account.

Setting it up

We wrote a step-by-step guide for the two most common ways to connect:

• claude.ai — add a custom integration in Settings, sign in once, done.
• ChatGPT — add a custom connector under Settings → Connectors, sign in once, done.

Either takes about 30 seconds. There's no API key to copy and paste — you sign in to FreeTodoList through the same browser flow you'd use anywhere else, click Authorize, and the assistant gets access until you revoke it.

The full guide is at /mcp_docs.

Privacy

The AI vendor (Anthropic, OpenAI) doesn't get a copy of your data. They see the responses to the specific tool calls the assistant makes during your conversation — the same way they'd see anything else you paste into a chat. We don't share your account with them, and they don't have any standing access.

You can revoke the connection any time from inside the AI assistant or from the FreeTodoList admin OAuth dashboard. Revocation takes effect immediately — the next request from that AI client gets blocked.

Why we built it

A todo list is a tool you reach for dozens of times a day. The most natural way to interact with it is to just say what you want — and increasingly, saying what you want happens in a chat with an AI. Instead of switching tabs to add a task you just thought of, you tell Claude or ChatGPT, and the task is on your list.

This is the first integration of its kind for FreeTodoList. The goal isn't to replace the UI — most people will still browse and edit lists in the normal way — but to give you a second, faster path for the moments when you're already mid-conversation with an assistant.

What's next

A few directions we're considering, depending on what people actually use:

• More tools (bulk operations, archive, share-link generation)
• A summarize my week / what should I focus on today prompt template
• Voice input via assistants that support it
• Tools that work with shared lists (read-only) for collaborators

If you have ideas for specific things you'd want to ask the assistant to do, send us feedback. MCP makes it pretty easy to add new capabilities once we know what people want.

Try it out and let us know how it goes.