I use the Join Conference Call feature a lot, now that (partially) working from home is the new normal.
(I was able to get the €11 for 1 year deal, which was a no-brainer - with the new prices I’m not so sure)
Huh, that’s +42% if I’m looking at the pricing right (I can’t find the new pricing in euros to directly compare with what I’m paying now). I think I still like Fantastical enough to let my subscription continue but I have about a month to reconsider. I mostly use it for natural language input, the way it syncs calendar sets across devices and the nice UI but that’s a steep price increase.
I use Openings and Scheduling a lot. I also appreciate the natural language input and the pleasant UI.
Essentially, in addition to being nice to work with, it replaces Doodle’s functionality for me. The bonus? It looks much better than Doodle, and costs considerably less, even with the price hike.
So thus far, it’s still worth it for me.
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I stopped using fantastical a few weeks ago, despite having 6 months remaining on my subscription.
I switched to the stock apple calendar.app.
I then bought meeter for a few dollars. It’s a simple app that shows my next zoom (etc) meetings in the menu bar.
I found fantastical irritating, and I’m glad to be rid of it.
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Fantastical: Openings, natural language parsing, calendar sets, widgets (better than Apple Calendar), more robust Watch app
Cardhop: literally everything is better than Apple Contacts - Lock Screen widget to quickly search/dial. Quickly adding of contact info, etc
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We’ve had some good threads on why Fantastical is valued by its users in the past.
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/why-do-you-consider-40-subscription-to-fantastical-worth-it
Since then, they’ve added the super useful quarterly view and open meeting slots (as far as what interests me.)
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Yes it is. But everything including food, fuel, and housing is getting more expensive, and people are needing higher wages if they are going to keep up. I expect we will continue to see programs move to subscriptions and software prices continue to increase. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see many native apps move to the cloud in an effort to hold down cost.
Still things today are a lot better than they were in the “good ole days”. In 1983 a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 was $495 ($1414 in 2022 dollars).
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Meeter looks great, the join meeting feature of Fantastical was the main value add for me so this is really interesting.
Meeter has not been updated in 2 years?
Does it run OK on recent iOS / iPadOS / macOS versions?
It runs perfectly, as far as I can tell, on my macs. I don’t think there is an ipad or iPhone version
Meeter and their successor product are neat little utilities. They work best if you don’t need to hide many events or filter calendars.
I’ve been using Fantastical mainly for the reasons others have listed: the joining conference calls feature, calendar sets, and natural language entry. The latter two are particularly useful for my weekly planning meeting, where I figure out how I’m going to schedule my working hours for the next week.
I have until next October to decide about renewing. The increased price doesn’t feel outrageous to me (I last paid $39.99 in October), but the recent thread on BusyCal and the fact that it’s available via SetApp are making me think that I might try BusyCal before renewing my Fantastical subscription.
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BusyCal and BusyContacts come with a 30 day trial (from their website busymac.com). Probably the most customizable apps out there. Other than “openings”, it offers a larger feature-set than Fantastical. They offer a perpetual license (you get to keep the app forever, but get 18 months of free updates for your purchase; upgrading after 18 months is optional).
If you’re fed-up of paying altogether, Apple Calendar is not entirely terrible. Apple Contacts is OK - unusable a lot of times on the mac however with a mind of its own (there’s way way to control the sync frequency and changes don’t sync immediately).
I like Fantastical well enough – I used BusyCal for a while, but Fantastical’s natural language input was far better (this was some time ago, it may have changed).
That’s the absolute top feature for me. No. 2 is being able to open the mini window with a key press to add something, or key press and then a tab for search.
I detest looking at my calendar in Fantastical. The mini window is almost unusable for that give the number of events I have. The full view is good – but I don’t find it any better than the stock Calendar app. I just use Calendar to look at my events.
It’s nice to be able to join meetings from the menu bar, but there are other solutions for that. And I only started using it recently. Clicking a link in the event isn’t that difficult.
So really, it’s the quick and natural-language input for me.
That’s worth the $40 I’ve been paying to me. Not sure about 40% more. I bet there’s a command-line app I can use instead, and then run it via KM or Hammerspoon.
Cardhop is really good. But by the time it came along, I had written my own script to parse a line of text into a contact, and I still find that faster.
I have until October…
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They had a 50% off Black Friday sale, and I missed it by a day. I was shocked to see the price increase today (it seems substantial!).
I know and understand that costs are going up; I work in a field powered by donations, so we’re feeling the crunch everywhere, too.
Honestly, I’m gonna have to make some serious choices soon, too, because all of these little increases on everything adds up big.
It’s a bummer to me because I’ve been using since V1, too, but it’s mainly been because I like the esthetics of it.
My work heavily relies on calendar usage. I am 70-80% of my day in meetings. I use Fantastical, but only because I picked it up when they had a huge sale a year ago
For my day to day work of working in my company, I don’t see the value. We’re Google Calendar driven, and there is still so much where I have to go through the web interface because Fantastical can’t do it (“suggest a time” in google as an example). Not sure they ever can, because obviously google stuff works best in the interface they created for it. Natural parsing of text is great, but hits it’s limits quick when you need to schedule a meeting with 4-5 different people, find an available room and add a meeting document.
I use the “open meeting link” a lot, but could replace that with meeter
Cardhop is odd. I actually bought it before it went to subscription, but I use it when I need to do stuff in my contacts which is almost never. Maybe once every 2-3 weeks. I’m probably not the target audience for it
Now outside of my main work, I love Fantasticals “openings” because it replaces Calendly and doesn’t cost anything more. But that was also more situational when my work at that time involved a lot of meetings with other companies.
Soooo in the end… For me I don’t think I’ll renew it. If it’s just for seeing my calendar and the occasional reschedule, Apple Calendar can do that
btw natural language processing in the stock app is also getting pretty good:
it can’t do locations or people from what I can tell, but for quick adds it’s fine
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Meeter and their successor product are neat little utilities.
What’s the successor product?
Price increase aside, I love this announcement:
“There’s inflation, we’re raising prices. Cancel or don’t, up to you. “
Saves us from the “it’s only the cost of a 7.52 oz latte every 1.68 days!”
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Well, that’s it for me then. I used Fantastical mainly for some minor features like being able to hide single events (I use lots of shared calendars from colleagues which include stuff not relevant for me.)
I contemplated cancelling my sub twice, but ended up renewing mainly because I liked the UI of Fantastical better than BusyCal. But aesthetics alone is not worth it with the 40% price increase for me. I just bought a $8 BusyCal license in their Black Friday bundle deal and migrated my Mac. So far so good!
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