I’ve been a Fantastical User since perhaps day one. I love the natural language entry, but never really loved the GUI of the app. Seems I was always missing something - which is on me, not the app. I don’t mind the price increase as much as many of you seem to. I don’t think $60 is too much to pay for an app I rely on day to day/hour to hour.
But this discussion has offered me the opportunity to look at other options, and I am really liking BusyCal. Their natural language entry seems as good as Fantastical, but the calendar filters and the “heat map” display in the menu bar are super handy. Pretty sure I will switch over in perminately in February.
I’m going to be switching to BusyCal (within my Setapp subscription).
It’s also given me a chance to trial some different approaches, and the combination of Structured (it’s come a long way since I tried v1) plus Moleskine Timepage (I think I’m somehow grandfathered in) has been a pleasant change.
Shouldn’t we be paying less for software today than we did in the past? If software should cost more, by that line of thinking shouldn’t storage as well? You can’t say the market will figure it out on one hand and then say the race to the bottom is all on Apple. If so, why didn’t the market figure it out then? And I fully accept that my logic could be flawed here…
I don’t agree with the argument on subscriptions. Many examples of companies/developers justifying the subscriptions with arguments based on continuous development, speed of release, etc. and then not doing much. Also, in the enterprise it’s about nothing more than the multiples that the street is willing to pay for subscription revenue.
Personally, I don’t really care anymore. If a subscription is charged that I’m not willing to pay, I move on. I just wish these companies would be honest and say “because we want more money”…
I agree with almost all of your points, but I just wanted to make a comment on this one.
Storage is cheaper because any given innovation (the human component) is generally discovered once, and is then replicable at scale by machines that don’t get paid hourly. Even if the machine operator wages go up, the quality of the machine-made product increases in capacity at enough of a rate that it mitigates increased labor costs. This has always been the case.
Pretty much ALL of software is labor cost, with upward pressure on prices due to (frequently) consistent work needed to keep a given app functional. The downward pressure on the price comes from the fact that more paying users should theoretically equal less cost per user.
As I said though, I pretty much agree with your conclusions.
I used to use a social media scheduling app that cost $20/month. Didn’t need it at the time, so I cancelled it. Came back a year or so later, and their lowest priced plan was $80. And I saw an article from some senior exec at the company saying that they couldn’t make money at any less than $80/month. Never mind that their highest-priced plan a year previous had only been about $40.
I’m fine with the logic that “our software helps you make money, so we want some of that”. Value-based fees are a thing. But like you, I just wish they’d come out and say that.
Good additions here. The reason I do like sub and SaaS is that it is less expensive to get in the system and try it out. It’s also less of a hassle to get out. Loyal users will end up paying more than boxed software in the long run. I think all of these apps have a price threshold for most users and companies need to strike that balance. For me, even $30 was more than I was getting out of Fantastical. I was getting even less out of Cardhop.
I’m really glad Apple is letting developers easily increase the subscription and I’m glad they hit you in the face with it via notification and email when it comes. It’s given me an opportunity to really assess how valuable Fantastical is to me. Perhaps I’m wrong and I’ll decide to come back down the road.
Have also cancelled my Flexibits subscription. Do have SetApp, so may try BusyCal, but not sure whether to stick with Apple Calendar on iOS or try something else.
I agree, unless it’s a company that doesn’t offer monthly options. I know that most stuff in the App Store offers monthly/quarterly/yearly options - but I’ve seen a number of companies that show “priced monthly, billed yearly”. I’ve seen a number of services that I would’ve happily tried out for a month to evaluate, but got turned off by the fact that billing was annual.
At the point they force annual billing, IMHO, it’s no different from a software purchase - no matter what the subscription cost is.
I’m not sure what I think about this. This is definitely true of any calendar (or other) software that uses a standardized backend data format. As long as you can grab another app and just sync it up, all good.
But there are a fair number of apps where this isn’t the case. The monthly pricing for Adobe Creative Cloud, for example, doesn’t make it any easier to get out as all the data is almost certainly in Adobe’s file formats.
Agree 100%. I love that Apple emails you to let you know a renewal is coming up.
Also under-sung: The ability to cancel even an annual subscription now and have it remain in-force until the subscription date.
It’s great to just be able to plan to let it expire. It might be better if this were the default, but OK, Apple has two sets of customers to keep happy: device-owners and app-makers.
That’s been my policy. I think “the race to the bottom brought on by Apple’s app stores” that @karlnyhus mentioned has worked against a lot of developers and in turn has hurt us.
What kind of apps would we have if devs were able to sell their products for $50, $100, or more? I wouldn’t have thought twice about paying $100 for LumaFusion. Instead they make about $20 for an excellent app. IMO something needs to change.
I think there’s also a different paradigm in play since the platform owner provides a much more robust suite of apps as part of the product, so “free” is more of a default expectation - even on a $50 Android phone.
Contrast that with the days when an Apple IIGS was $3000 or so, and didn’t even really come with any meaningful software.
You must have missed some of the heated discussions on this forum about software price hikes, swearing off subscriptions, and the prevalence of the phrase when software is recommended, “and it’s free.”
You could pay a $20 annual subscription, and just consider yourself amortizing the cost over five years before the next version comes out and you do it again (or cancel if you don’t want to buy the new version). Not a perfect analogy, but close.
It doesn’t. It just happens to be where we notice it the most. In retail it’s the WalMart effect - products from companies either being cheapened specifically to sell to WalMart with their own SKUs, being cheapened overall due to WalMart’s demands, or not entering the market at all due to the problem of not being able to sell at scale.
The interesting thing with phones is that quite a few people finance them. The cost difference between a cheap subsidized phone and a $30/month iPhone - or a carrier-subsidized iPhone that locks you into a contract for a cheaper rate - appears to be minimal.
But it also provides a clue as to why subscription revenue / software costs are viewed as a problem.
Imagine you’re paying $30/month for an iPhone. Now a company wants $6/month for some software. That’s 20% of the price of your phone for one app. In the grand scheme of things, the two price points are completely unrelated - and the app might even be worth spending more money on than the phone. But it doesn’t seem that way.
More and better commercial plugins. More and better features. Better support. Long-term adoption by an industry. Decades of data tied up in legacy formats. A company that gives it away for next-to-nothing to the education market, so that’s what people are learning on before they get hired. Lots of reasons.
GIMP is probably a bad example for these purposes, but there’s a bunch of commercial software that’s like that.
I haven’t thought about it in this way, but it’s a great example. I’m getting close to $75 per month on app subscriptions and that’s not including streaming services. It’s almost double what I’m paying for the iPhone per month. I’m clearly not anti-subscription but I suspect many developers don’t think about pricing carefully. Does every app – even ones without server or cloud costs – need to cost $5-10 per month?
I sometimes wonder how developers survived the 90s and 00s… Without subscriptions. I’m not totally against the subscription model. Like cloud space. If you rent a server somewhere, you have to pay. If you want a VPN service, you have to pay. It is obvious why.
But today so many companies want to tell us that they can’t survive without subscriptions. That they can’t develop new features. That they need a constant flow of money to be creative. And so on.
On the other hand, it has never been easier to create new software. There is AI that can help you code. There are frameworks. There are wrappers like Electron that make software easily available on all platforms.
Fantastical is a great looking calendar and I was willing to spend money on each new version. But I can’t get behind the idea of paying a subscription for a calendar app or a text editor or a password manager. And when they use proprietary file formats like Ulysses or 1Password, they lock you into their system, and when you’re deep into their systems, you won’t switch to another service because it’s too hard.
Of course developers can develop new features. BBEdit has been around for decades and from time to time offers paid upgrades of their products. Unfortunately, AFAIK, iOS developers still can’t do that.
Perhaps Apple will decide to allow that in the future, or they will be forced to revise the App Store. Or, as some prominent developers have publicly discussed, perhaps we continue to see more web based services, cross platform software, and/or progressive web apps, etc. Or just more subscriptions.
Developers aren’t immune from inflation so it seems reasonable they need to find some way to survive.
