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).
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.
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…
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
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!”
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!
I agree with this. It’s very much to the point which feels refreshing.
Maybe a neutral announcement results in a more neutral response and not everybody getting angry at them?
(So far most responses I found on Social Media were equally neutral comments of people evaluating whether they stay on Fantastical or move to BusyCal / Apple Calendar etc.)
Bardeen—it’s a more general tool but tried to solve the same problem as Meeter (prepping for meetings and being on time to meetings being inconvenient.)
I am a Fantastical user. I could get by just with the stock calendar app, but I am very happy to see how Flexibits does make use of everything Apple has to offer:
And much more stuff…
Only a few days ago most of us noticed Apple’s App Store Awards over here and here and commented that they were more like “meh”. I felt the same to some degree.
What we are experiencing right now is that the market for software is changing - again. @WayneG has has mentioned it above: there once was a time when software did cost a fortune. That has gone way down to a point where software started to be called “apps” - it was the advent of the App Stores. And everybody tried a concept where software had to be dirt cheap or even “free”. That can work for open source projects with a striving community of developers, but commercial products being sold by developers that want to make a living off their apps need to earn real money and they need to find a niche in the market for it to be sustainable.
As @Jeremy has phrased it in his own words, Flexibits has made a decision: make apps that are of value and sell them at a price Flexibits considers to be adequate. It is the customers’ decision if the price is ok given their individual needs or not.
It took me some time, but I am back in my personal pre App Store period when I did not need every app only because it was the new and shiny one. I am absolutely ok and even happy to pay the price for an app if it is worth it to me. That is something that can and does change all the time. Apple’s Reminders app is the perfect example for that. I switched back to Apple’s Reminders after having been a Things and OmniFocus user for years (not simultaneously of course). Why? Because I got to the conclusion that my GTD needs are more than fulfilled in the stock app in 2022. And I am perfectly aware of the fact that there are a lot of users that will come to a different conclusion.
I have paid the yearly subscription fee back in September. I will think about it in August 2023, if I am willing to pay the new price or not. Right now I am undecided, because I am definitely no calendar power user (but then again I am someone who likes Fantastical so much that I already have come back twice to use it after abandoning it). But I totally get what Flexibits is doing and why they are heading this direction. I guess we all have to learn again just to make our own individual cost-benefit analysis for software (at least that is what I have to learn again). I have to admit that I maybe was too lax in that matter in the last decade when it comes down to “apps”. Why? Because a lot of apps were sold at prices so low that they were “no-brainers” just because of their price, not necessarily because of their value/features. That is not sustainable in the long run. Neither for the developer, nor for the customer.
Darn it. I forgot about the Fantastical watch complication, which is miles better than the stock calendar’s app.
But I agree with your analysis for the most part. Good software has been underpriced for a long time, because the pool of potential new users has remained large and growing with iPhone adoption. But the market is more crowded, and there aren’t that many more customers coming into the market. A sustainable business model has to acknowledge this – the rapid growth days are over for most app categories.
I just renewed in September so I’ve got a while to think about it. Seems awfully pricy for a calendar app - a calendar app I have to sign into twice a week because of my work’s Office 365 setup.
That said, having reminders and calendar mixed together is handy. For me, I don’t like all my day’s tasks lumped into my day, but those little “don’t forget to do this at time A” are helpful.
I know other apps do the reminders/cal thing but I don’t love their design and flow eg (Calendars 5). I do have a grandfathered Moleskine Timepage account so it’s free — I may revisit that again.
I’ve cancelled 7 software subscriptions this year and more are likely to follow. Here in the UK energy prices have gone nuts and I’m paying an extra £150 per month now.
I think app developers should think long and hard before raising their prices in the current financial climate. Especially when stock apps will cover what you’re offering. Maybe they won’t do it as well, but if it’s for free, it’s hard to beat.