In an increasingly complex world, managing daily tasks, personal commitments, and professional responsibilities can be overwhelming. This growing demand for intuitive organizational tools led to the rise of Any.do, an all-in-one productivity powerhouse.
Built with Heroku at its core, Any.do rapidly evolved from a simple mobile app into a trusted, multi-platform solution serving more than 40 million users worldwide. What began as a tool for personal task management has expanded to empower small and medium-sized businesses with dedicated project management features, all while maintaining agile growth and operational efficiency.
Maximizing impact with a lean team: Any.do’s Heroku-powered efficiency
At the heart of Any.do’s remarkable success is a deliberate philosophy: maintaining a relatively small yet highly effective team. Despite consistent and rapid growth in its user base, Heroku enabled Any.do to maintain its lean structure.
A smaller headcount offers significant advantages for a remote, global team, facilitating faster communication and reducing resource allocation for overhead and infrastructure. The challenge then becomes how to serve an ever-expanding user base without increasing operational expenses. For Any.do, the answer lies in effective use of automation, AI, and leveraging low-maintenance tools like Heroku that manage infrastructure complexities.
Built for focus: Heroku enables Any.do to prioritize product innovation
From the early days of Any.do, the team focused on keeping things simple—both for app users and itself. This meant relying on Heroku to take care of the underlying infrastructure and technical performance, allowing the team to invest maximum energy into product development and focus on growing the business around it.
Following the Pareto principle of investing in the 20% of features that generate 80% of the benefit to users, Any.do quickly gained attention and praise for its intuitive nature and smooth user experience. This led to positive press recognition and both Google and Apple featuring Any.do as a standout app.
We wanted to be as focused as possible on the product and on our business, on delivering value quickly to users. Right at the beginning, we believed that Heroku would be something that will require a very minimum amount of effort in maintenance and scaling.
Why Any.do chose Heroku: speed, simplicity, and scalability
When development first began, the team weighed its options and quickly arrived at Heroku as the logical choice. Any.do co-founder Yoni Lindenfeld explained why he chose to build the base application on Heroku. “For us as a startup with a small team, it’s obviously important that everything works, that the servers are up and running, and we can deploy changes fast. But we wanted that part of the development to be something that we’re not investing too much time into. We wanted something that wouldn’t require too much effort on our part for maintenance and scaling, so we could focus on the product itself.”
This strategic choice paid off. While alternative solutions might have delivered a similar end result, they would have demanded significantly greater investment and a larger engineering team. Crucially, because Heroku doesn’t require specialized knowledge, the same developers building new features can effortlessly manage their deployment from staging to production. This integrated, low-friction solution allows Any.do to identify bugs more easily and close development loops faster.
The speed that it allows you to go from nothing to something. With a few clicks of a button, I can spin up an application and it’s running, it’s scalable, I can connect it to different services that I need that integrate with Heroku. It’s very easy for us to grow the business.
Seamless growth: scaling Any.do’s multi-platform app
A boom in users is great for business, but it can cause headaches and crunch for developers. Not with Heroku—as the Any.do community continued to grow, the team was able to seamlessly move the core of the app from hobby dynos to larger, more powerful setups able to handle the additional load.
This growth wasn’t just about handling more traffic; Yoni describes how those users were now also doing more with the platform, with new functionality being rolled out across multiple platforms. “Because we had more features, we had more users who had more data, we needed machines with more memory. We both scaled up with bigger machines and scaled out with more machines and more dynos based on our application growth needs.”
From our growth, the more users, more clients, more platforms that we had, it was very easy on Heroku to add more dynos to cater for all the additional load.
DevOps without DevOps
Remarkably for a top-rated multi-platform app used by more than 40,000,000 people, Any.do doesn’t have to spend additional resources on operations overhead. That’s entirely thanks to Heroku. The simplicity it offers means developers themselves are able to do the DevOps work as part of their standard workload. Not only does this save on resources, it lets those engineers understand exactly what’s always going on across all environments.
Yoni credits this unparalleled level of efficiency as a primary reason Any.do has maintained Heroku at its core since the beginning. “In the past, we’ve looked at different things to see if there’s a better solution or maybe we can save some money. But always, even if the service appears a bit less expensive, we would end up needing more personnel to manage and maintain it, so it ends up not being cost effective.”
There’s still a lot of room for us to grow with Heroku, so I really hope it will keep serving us as it did in the last 10 years and more. We’re planning to stay on Heroku as much as possible.
What’s next for the Any.do team?
Any.do is looking forward to developing innovative solutions with AI and agents, which has enormous potential for value creation in the productivity space. It also plans to continue scaling with Heroku, which has been Any.do’s trusted dev platform for the past decade. As the business has grown, Heroku has grown with it—consistently meeting evolving needs and enabling continued innovation. Based on its deep familiarity with the platform, Any.do sees plenty of room for continued expansion and expects Heroku to keep delivering as it has over the last 10 years.
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How the Any.do team did it
- Python as the primary Any.do coding language
- Heroku infrastructure enables fast prototyping and proofs-of-concept
- Heroku dynos for running the Any.do application
- Heroku API web dyno provides logging, metric tracking, and analytics
- Autoscaling for automatically increasing the number of web dynos
- Heroku Key-Value Store and Heroku Postgres for data management
