Me neither (I drink over 99% of my coffee at home/work/family/friends, but not in a coffee shop).
I remember an App author comparing App subscriptions/purchases to the price of watching one movie in a theater instead (which I do now and then). Over here that’s between 10 and 20 Euros for 2 hours of entertainment.
That might actually also help in budgeting (limiting): I drink multiple coffees per day, but watch at most a few movies (in a theater) per month.
I also don’t like coffee comparisons, even though I used one. I’m in the UK, tea is still far more than twice as popular as coffee (though our increased Americanisation and proliferation of Starbucks etc., makes that gap shrink each year). Also, outside big cities that have a lot of white collar office space (we have many cities that don’t really have this to any notable degree), we just don’t have this “grab a coffee before work” culture that seems prevalent in some other countries. I’m in a town and don’t know anyone in my acquaintance or office that does this. Coffee shops are for meeting up socially as a treat (and really, I suspect most people go for the nice cakes, not the coffee 
).
In any case, as has been mentioned many times on this forum, developers seem to believe their app is the only one we subscribe to. We’re not “increasing a sub for the price of a coffee”. We’re increasing 4 subs for the price of 4 coffees, and the maths can collapse quite quickly at that point.
BusyCal has this function, though I don’t know if it’s exactly what you want. It has a menu widget thing that says “next call in 13 minutes” and counts down. I quite like it and BusyCal’s price isn’t too bad (I think I got it via BundleHunt).
Far more useful with BusyCal (for me) is the fact that you can customise the meeting alert. It can be a stand-alone pop-up (not via Mac notifications), you can present it anywhere on screen (useful if you have a large monitor), you can snooze alerts and the snooze time can be altered per alert without changing the default setting, and it can force itself on top of any open windows. As someone who ignores calendar alerts, I’ve found this invaluable.
Not correct - the recent ONS revision puts it higher than France since the pandemic.
(UK economy bigger than before the pandemic, ONS admits)
Also not accurate coffee is already more popular (Coffee is nudging tea aside in the UK’s affections. What can this civilisational shift mean? | Coco Khan | The Guardian)
Have you been to France recently? Inflation is lower and they don’t have the same cost of living crisis that the UK is experiencing. Inflation in France last month was 5.1%, in the UK it was 6.8% (and I’m rounding down). At the beginning of the year when inflation rose sharply across many European countries, France reached over 6%, whilst the UK was over 10% (a decrease from autumn). Anyway, I’m not debating this with you unless you’ve actually been living in France recently and have seen product prices for yourself. It’s completely pointless telling me (and other people moving between the two countries) that the UK is cheaper to live in than France when I can see with my own eyes (and bank balance) that this is not true.
I was using old data for the tea/coffee debate: 2019 still had tea far in the lead, though as I’d noted myself the gap was shrinking. Interestingly, Statista (the source behind the link you’ve shared) say tea sales were hit by the disruption of 2020, but don’t then say why that was. They do forecast a recovery though (also without saying why). I’m wary of those surveys anyway as they’re not published in full, and it matters what is being compared. What’s of most value is to compare % total hot drinks consumed. E.g. if everyone is now having a cup of coffee to start the day, but then has 4 cups of tea throughout the day, tea is still a clear winner even if it’s coffee that’s reached for first thing or coffee where more household income is spent. (But actually it’s even more complicated than that because some of these consumer surveys don’t make a distinction between black teas versus other teas - they just call it all tea - whereas I’m specifically interested in black tea v coffee, and herbal/green/matcha/bubble teas do not count in this debate.)
I wouldn’t think flexibits has a lot of corporate customers. If you are a Microsoft or Google customer your admins can control how email and calendar, etc. are configured and roll out changes as needed.
IMO, that would be even more important in this day of hybrid workforces when local support isn’t available.
It seems to me that the “ask” here would effectively be for devs to discount their apps in foreign countries, and that doesn’t make sense to me.
Agree 100%. It’s one thing if Apple is using conversions that inflate the price. For example, I believe Apple rounds to even-dollar sorts of price points. But if it’s largely a straight-up currency conversion then the fee is what it is.
Subscription fees can sneak up on you. I was shocked by how much I was spending per year after doing a detailed audit. Subscriptions can quickly turn into “death by a thousand cuts”. Especially in Canadian dollars.
I was forced to revisit all of my subscriptions and honestly, Fantastical was one of the easier ones to let go. I’ve been a Fantastical user since it was first released, and it is a very good calendar app but their yearly fee just became too rich for me.
I like BusyCal a lot, but I rely heavily in color coding individual events in my calendar, and (shockingly) BusyCal doesn’t support color-coding in iOS devices.
Selecting a color for an individual event seems like a basic feature to have. (I am not saying it’s easy to do, I am not a dev). I am not sure why Google Calendar lets you do it, but the Apple stock calendar doesn’t.
Fantastical is the only calendar app that I’ve found that does it well for individual events across iPad, iPhone and Mac.
I paid the Fantastical subscription until September 2024, but I hope BusyCal adds this feature soon. I’ll make sure to ask them for it at least once a month
I’m another subscriber loss for Flexbits.
I love Fantastical, particularly the calendar sets, but it’s not worth the cost of entry for me any more.
Running multiple iterations of the native Calendar app is providing me with the “calendar sets” that I’ve lost after deleting Fantastical.
Welcome, and interesting idea. Are you automating launching or configuring these calendar instances in some way?
Nothing automated, I just have two copies of Calendar on my iPad, each with a different set of Calendars selected.
I’m not a huge user of focus modes but, of course, they could be used to filter calendars to form calendar sets.
Don’t tell Flexibits but, if you had already set up your calendar sets when you had a paid version of Fantastical, whilst you can’t select the sets in-app, Focus modes will still allow you to use Focus Filters to select your otherwise inaccessible Calendar Sets.
If I was grandfathered into v2 goodies, what exactly will I lose if I cancel my subscription to v3? I think I am paying for stuff I do not use.
I use the free version. It works for me.
I have paired mostly back to the Apple stock apps now. The software I buy is 1password, Devonthink, and Keyboard Maestro.
This is, as I posted before, the route that I’ve taken as well. And, as I’m reading more threads of this nature, I’m noticing what I think is a trend in this direction.
I wonder if there is a growing backlash to subscriptions?
Possibly. People are cutting back on a lot of thing due to inflation. Dining out, travel, streaming services, etc. One reason developers have been moving to subscriptions might also be due to inflation. If that’s the case we may see some subscription apps just disappear.
It’ll be a mix of many things. Cost will be one.
improving 1st party apps will also be part of the piece as well, I can either pay £60 a year for this 3rd party app, but Apple Mail can do 80% of the same things.
Also things like support for shortcuts may make a difference for intermediate users.
The third party app market and the backlash against it seem to be growing in parallel.
Yeah, what I don’t get is the pricing for some apps/services. I get that indie/smaller dev houses will usually charge more for their offerings compared to larger corporations but you can literally get a family MS Office 365 key for £60.
Fantastical? I’d pay at most £20 a year and even that would be a stretch. Not because I think the product is not good enough, it’s just that the nature of the service is that much worth to me (and possibly to most users?).