Everything on one screen: how often this usually needs to happen, the free way to set it on the iPhone you already own, and what changes if a phone call does it instead.
Monthly — once a month, on a date. The free built-in option comes first below, because for plenty of people it is genuinely the whole answer.
A monthly prompt fires eleven more times a year than anybody remembers it. There is no habit to hang it on, so the reminder is doing all of the work by itself.
Why this one slips: It is a long, quiet commitment with no monthly ceremony attached, which is exactly the shape of thing a busy month deletes without noticing.
Two alerts on a dated event is genuinely the right free tool for a deadline, and it costs nothing. Its weakness is the same as every notification: both alerts are silent banners you can clear without doing anything. If the timing is the hard part, an iPhone Clock alarm is stronger — iOS exempts alarms from the silent switch and from Do Not Disturb.
A silent banner still loses here: nothing visible changes the day you miss it, so the silent alert has to carry the entire weight on its own.
With ReminderCall your phone rings like a normal incoming call — a real call over the phone network, not a banner and not an in-app alarm. You answer, and a voice reads the reminder out loud in the words you wrote. Answering is an action, which is harder to do absent-mindedly than clearing a notification.
To be precise about it: a call follows your ring settings rather than your notification settings. On hard mute it vibrates and takes over your screen instead of ringing out loud, unless you save the number as a contact with Emergency Bypass switched on yourself.
It is a long, quiet commitment with no monthly ceremony attached, which is exactly the shape of thing a busy month deletes without noticing.
Dated obligations with a fee on the other side of them — the ones where forgetting has a price. The failure is almost never that you did not know — it is that the prompt arrived at a moment when acknowledging it was easier than acting on it. A monthly prompt fires eleven more times a year than anybody remembers it. There is no habit to hang it on, so the reminder is doing all of the work by itself.
Read next: a bill payment reminder that actually works · a reminder app for people who forget everything · setting a repeating monthly call
Two alerts on a dated event is genuinely the right free tool for a deadline, and it costs nothing. Its weakness is the same as every notification: both alerts are silent banners you can clear without doing anything. If the timing is the hard part, an iPhone Clock alarm is stronger — iOS exempts alarms from the silent switch and from Do Not Disturb.
The other free move, and often the more effective one: anchor it to something you already do without thinking — after the kettle goes on, before you lock the front door, as you sit down at your desk. A reminder attached to an existing habit needs far less from your phone. Try both for a fortnight before you pay anybody for this.
Get ReminderCall — free on the App Store Get →