As someone in their 40s with ADHD, I'll offer a counterpoint.

I'm happy for people to try to make a business of this if the tools are helpful.

I've had a successful career, so I obviously had to develop my own strategies for managing it. But I'd be very happy if my kids didn't have to spend 20 years figuring it out for themselves. Monetize away.

Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle. I'd be happy to pay a modest bit of money to buy a simple app, and see if it helps -- but I'm very reluctant to sign up for a subscription.

Perhaps ironically, the less the app claims to do, the more likely I am to be interested.

I've only signed up for a paid mental health app subscription once -- and that was an app designed by a well-known psychologist with both an M.D. and a Ph.D., and even then only after reading his book.

Yes, exactly. A one-time purchase is great because ADHDers can impulse buy it and be done. A subscription is an extra mental burden I don't want or need.

Strategies can be shared for free as well.

Ryder Carroll is a good example. He created the bullet journal through trial and error to manage his own ADHD. He shared it for free. While he did write a book and partnered with a company to design a notebook (due to popular demand), he still gives away everything someone needs for free, and will be the first one to tell people you don’t need a special notebook.

i'm less worried about people monetizing it than I am about people pushing a lot of bad self-diagnosis memes based on nonsense criteria ("if you sleep with your arms in this pose, you have ADHD (and maybe autism)!") or just describing completely typical events as a meaningful symptom ("if you ever procrastinate, you might have ADHD")

I don't understand this sentiment.

Sure, there might be people out there selling snakeoil, but that's the case for every domain. Does that mean we nobody should try to make apps to solve domain problems at all? Of course not.

So you're asking everyone to stop monetizing ADHD. So the two alternatives are make the apps for free or don't make them at all. The former is not realistic or sustainable and later gives up potential upside.

I mean, do you think all ADHD apps will just be bad and are just people trying rip off ADHDers?

I think a more reasonable premise is yes, just in every domain, there will be snake oil sellers unfortunately and it's up to the consumer to watch out for those. But there will also be genuine people who are trying to solve this problem and that will potentially give people a lot of value for the money they pay for it.

Would you like to elaborate why you feel this way?

I have ADHD myself. Honestly, I'd like to make a service that will help everyone. To do that, I need money. I think that 5 dollars a month is not so much nowadays.

But why would it need to be subscription based?

Presumably the person is doing work on it on an ongoing basis..... This isn't that hard to figure out