Wunderlist founder wants to buy his app back from Microsoft

Four years ago, Christian Reber sold his company, makers of the Wunderlist productivity app, to Microsoft for somewhere between $100 million and $200 million.

Now, in an unusual move, Reber is pleading with the company to let him buy the app back — so he can save it from being shut down for good.

Microsoft acquired the popular to-do list app in 2015 at a time when it was furiously scooping up productivity apps in order to bolster its own mobile software. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that the deal was valued somewhere between $100 million and $200 million. But, in 2017, Microsoft announced plans to retire Wunderlist in favor of its own Microsoft-branded to-do list app. 

Wunderlist is, for now, still available but it hasn’t been receiving updates and Reber tweeted that he’s “still sad Microsoft wants to shut down Wunderlist even though people still love and use it.”

“I’m serious @satyanadella @marcusash,” he wrote, addressing Microsoft’s CEO and general manager. “Please let me buy it back. Keep the team and focus on @MicrosoftToDo, and no one will be angry for not shutting down @Wunderlist.”

He later tweeted out a list of new features he’d plan to create for the service, should he be able to regain control, including making it “open-source and free forever.”

It’s not clear if anyone at Microsoft is taking his offer seriously. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Reber is far from the first founder to be unhappy with an acquiring company’s decisions about its service. Vine founder Rus Yusupov has been vocal about his regret over selling the video app to Twitter, which eventually shut it down. (Yusupov also weighed in on Reber’s situations, telling the Wunderlist founder that the situation was a “no-brainer” and that he was “rooting” for the Wunderlist creator.)

Reber was quick to point out that he has no hard feelings toward Microsoft, writing on Twitter that he has “nothing but gratitude” and that the acquisition “made perfect sense” at the time.

“I’m just sad that our plans for Wunderlist didn’t work out, but I also don’t want to point fingers at anyone. Acqusitions are hard,” he wrote.