Sunsama Review (2026): Is It Worth $22 a Month?
Sunsama is a daily planner that walks you through planning each morning and shutting down each evening. It pulls tasks in from Asana, Jira, Notion, Gmail, Slack and the rest, asks you to pick what realistically fits today, and puts those tasks on your calendar.
The short verdict: Sunsama is the calmest, most opinionated planner in its category, and people who stick with the ritual tend to stay for years. The catches: there is no free plan, it costs $22 a month (or $17 a month billed yearly), the phone app draws most of the complaints, and there is still no offline mode. Its AI assistant, Sunny, helps you plan your day; it doesn’t take work off your plate. If what’s eating your day is scheduling and email with other people, Carly does that part for you.
Sunsama at a glance
| Sunsama (as of Sep 29, 2026) | |
|---|---|
| What it is | Guided daily planner: task import, timeboxing, planning and shutdown rituals, weekly objectives |
| Who makes it | Summay, Inc., a Y Combinator Winter 2019 company founded by Ashutosh Priyadarshy and Travis Meyer |
| Platforms | Web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS/iPadOS, Android |
| Price | Pro: $22/user/month billed monthly, or $17/user/month billed yearly ($204/year) |
| Free plan / trial | No free plan; 14-day trial, no credit card required |
| Best for | Knowledge workers who want a daily ritual across several task tools |
| Biggest limitation | Weak mobile app, no offline mode, and it plans your work rather than doing any of it |
Per Sunsama’s company story, it raised a $2.4M seed round after YC and has been profitable since 2022.
What Sunsama actually does
Guided daily planning. The planning flow reviews yesterday, has you pull in tasks from integrations, your backlog and weekly objectives, then sums your planned time against a workload threshold and warns you if you’re over. Sunsama’s own tip for a 9-to-5: plan about 5.5 hours of work. You can post the plan to Slack or Teams.
Timeboxing. Drag a task onto the calendar, or press X to auto-schedule it into the next free slot in your working hours. When a task runs long or finishes early, auto-rescheduling shifts the tasks after it; meetings are never moved.
Daily shutdown and weekly review. At shutdown Sunsama shows what you worked on and builds daily highlights with optional AI summaries. The weekly review checks progress against your weekly objectives and prompts a short journal.
Task imports. Sunsama lists integrations with Asana, ClickUp, GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, Jira, Linear, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft To Do, Monday.com, Notion, Outlook, Slack, Todoist, Toggl and Trello, plus Apple Reminders and Zapier. Calendars come from Google, Outlook and iCloud. Anything else can be forwarded to a Sunsama email address to become a task.
Sunny, the AI assistant. Sunny is a chat and voice assistant inside the app. Per Sunsama’s Sunny guide, it can create, move and timebox tasks, sort a “braindump” into your backlog, accept or decline meeting invites, and summarize last week’s work for your manager. Users spotted it under beta settings in November 2025, and Sunny and MCP dropped their “Beta” badges on August 28, 2026 (voice mode is still labeled experimental). There’s no AI add-on or credit system; it’s included in Pro.
MCP connector. Sunsama runs a hosted MCP server with OAuth, so ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and Notion agents can read and edit your tasks. Since the September 23, 2026 update, connected AI apps can also read and post task comments.
What users say
Sunsama rates 4.5 from 506 ratings on the US App Store and 4.0 on Trustpilot, where it has only a handful of reviews (checked Sep 29, 2026).
Where it earns its price
Loyalty is the recurring theme. A September 2026 App Store reviewer wrote: “Of all the apps I’ve ever tried, this is the only one I’ve never cancelled and use every single day.”
The consolidation-plus-ritual combination is the reason. A consultant on Trustpilot said: “This app pulls it ALL into one place that you look at right at the start of the day and you basically pick and plan what you will do that day, and see it all populated in your day calendar. no more ‘what should I work on today’ head scratching.”
Even heavy app-testers land here. One r/Sunsama user who listed more than 20 planners they’d tried (Akiflow, Motion, Reclaim, Morgen, TickTick and others) concluded: “Sunsama has the fewest downsides. Its mobile app isn’t great, but I’ve learned to live with it.”
Our read: people who actually do the morning ritual rarely leave.
Where people get stuck
Price, relative to other to-do apps. In February 2026, an r/Sunsama user posted: “At $20 a month, it’s the most expensive subscription I have in my set of tools (it shocks me to say that.)” They switched to Todoist’s free plan.
The phone app. A February 2026 App Store review titled “Excellent Workflows, Poor Mobile Execution” reads: “Mobile app is near unusable for task editing/addition… The desktop/web app is much more useful, which makes the mobile app all the more disappointing for us subscribers.” A June 2026 reviewer added that “planned times don’t persist, task names can’t be changed, duplicate tasks are added to the calendar.”
Pace of development. In January 2026 an r/Sunsama user wrote that they hadn’t “seen a single feature being implemented” in a year. The changelog has been weekly again since mid-2026.
Our read: the complaints are about the phone and the price, almost never about the planning method itself.
Sunsama pricing
Prices as listed on Sep 29, 2026, confirmed in Sunsama’s billing FAQ (USD; Sunsama says it offers no discounts for non-US countries).
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pro, monthly | $22 per user per month | Every feature, including Sunny, MCP and Zapier |
| Pro, yearly | $17 per user per month, billed as $204/year | Same features |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | SSO/SAML, SCIM, audit logs, custom data terms |
| Trial | Free for 14 days | No card; access ends when it expires |
What changed in 2026. Sunsama held its price at $20 a month or $16 billed yearly (the cofounder’s own figures from 2020) until 2026, when its pricing manifesto says it “finally updated it” after five years. That’s $2 more monthly, or $12 a year on annual. Careful: a stale FAQ lower on Sunsama’s pricing page still says “$25/month per person ($20/month for yearly plans),” contradicting its own price card and billing docs, and some third-party articles repeat it. Background: did Sunsama raise its prices?
Hidden costs and fine print:
- Per user. Teams pay per seat, billed to one admin, with mid-month additions prorated. No volume discount is published.
- No refunds stated. You can cancel anytime and keep access to the end of the billing cycle. Workspace data is permanently deleted 30 days after a cancelled subscription ends.
- Discounts exist, quietly. Students with a school email and nonprofits can request discounts from support. Referrals earn $22 in credit each side. No Black Friday sales.
Real cost:
- Solo (Josh): $264 a year on monthly billing, or $204 upfront on yearly.
- 5-person team (Emily’s agency): $1,320 a year monthly, or $1,020 a year on annual billing.
Is it worth it? If you’ll do the ritual, $17 a month is fair for a tool you open every workday (Sunsama frames it as about $1 a workday). If you plan from your phone or want the app to schedule for you, it’s expensive for what you’ll use.
Problems and limits
- No offline mode. The offline-mode request has been open since June 2020 with 230 votes. A July 2026 commenter wrote: “I didn’t realize there was not offline support until just now, when the whole app is failing to load.”
- Setup starts on a computer. A March 2026 App Store reviewer complained: “You can ONLY get set up on a computer, not with your phone.”
- Manual by design. The founder said on Hacker News that “you will make a better decision about what to work on than an algorithm.” If you want the app to decide, see our Motion AI review and Reclaim AI review.
- Sunny stays inside your plan. Every documented Sunny job concerns your own tasks, calendar and settings, not other people.
Sunsama vs Carly
| Sunsama | Carly | |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Helps you plan your own day | Does email and scheduling work for you |
| How you use it | Desktop, web and mobile apps | CC or forward Carly on email, text it, or use the web app |
| Scheduling with other people | You handle it; Sunny can accept or decline invites | CC Carly on a thread; it finds times, sends invites, handles reschedules |
| Booking pages and polls | Not built in; a booking-link request is still open on its roadmap | Booking pages plus group availability polls |
| Inbox | Turns emails into tasks | Triages, drafts, replies, and follows up |
| Automations | Zapier, email forwarding, MCP | Visual workflows triggered by new emails, calendar events, forms, or schedules |
| Apps | Task-tool and calendar integrations | Connects to thousands of apps, including Asana, Slack, Notion, and HubSpot |
| Price | $22/month or $17/month billed yearly | Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month |
Sunsama makes you better at deciding what to do today. Carly shrinks the list. A client who wants “sometime next week” becomes a Sunsama task you still have to handle; CC Carly instead and it proposes times from your Google or Outlook calendar, replies, and sends the invite. It also triages and drafts email replies, and Email Agents give you separate assistants with their own address for intake or support.
Sunsama wins if your problem is focus and overcommitment on solo work. The two also combine well: Sunsama for your own deep work, Carly for everything involving someone else. For a team rollout, book a call. We go deeper in Carly AI vs Sunsama.
Who should use Sunsama, and who should look elsewhere
Use Sunsama if:
- You juggle tasks across Asana, Jira, Notion, Linear or Gmail and want one place to plan the day
- You chronically overcommit and want a workload check every morning
- You’ll work mostly from a laptop or desktop
Look elsewhere if:
- You want software to schedule tasks for you (Motion vs Sunsama)
- You want a faster, keyboard-first planner (Akiflow vs Sunsama, Akiflow review) or a calendar-first one (Morgen vs Sunsama)
- You plan from your phone or work offline often
- Your bottleneck is email and meetings with other people (Carly handles that)
More options: Sunsama alternatives.
FAQ
Is Sunsama worth it?
Yes, if you’ll do the planning and shutdown ritual most workdays. It’s poor value if you plan from your phone or want automatic scheduling. If you need scheduling and email handled for you, Carly fits better.
How much does Sunsama cost?
As of Sep 29, 2026, Sunsama Pro is $22 per user per month billed monthly, or $204 per user per year ($17 a month) billed yearly. Enterprise pricing is custom. It rose from $20 and $16 in 2026.
Does Sunsama have a free plan?
No, and its pricing manifesto says it doesn’t plan to add one. The 14-day trial needs no credit card and doesn’t auto-charge.
What is Sunsama AI (Sunny)?
Sunny is the built-in chat and voice assistant, included in Pro and out of beta since August 28, 2026. It creates and timeboxes tasks, organizes your backlog, and summarizes finished work.
Does Sunsama work with Outlook?
Yes. It imports Outlook emails as tasks, syncs Outlook calendars, and supports Teams, Planner and To Do. For an assistant that also replies and schedules from Outlook, Carly works with Outlook and Microsoft 365 as well as Gmail, and handles several accounts at once.
Related: Akiflow pricing · Best AI tools for time blocking · Best AI tools for daily planning
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