Yeah, and the problem with it being a free app is that anyone can leave a review. With a paid app, only people who have paid for it can review it. So they’re getting beaten up for offering a free app with much of the previously-paid functionality.
Elsewhere today I read this as the opening lines of a blog post announcing Dropzone 4 Released:
Dropzone 4 is a big release not just in terms of the app itself but also the business behind it and how I plan to run Aptonic moving forward.
Anyone want to guess what the new business model is? I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with “bubscriptionz”.
Fortunately the developer has said he plans to stay in Setapp.
Dropzone is a cool app, and I’ve had a license since 2011, but I can’t think of anything really big that has changed since it was introduced. $24/year would be a hard sell for me for that, but if he actually does add new features, I might consider it.
Mouseposé
Of course, my fävorite subscription is still, hands down, Mouseposé:
Mouseposé is the indispensable mouse pointer highlighting tool (aka „virtual laserpointer“) for everyone doing demos at tradeshows, presentations, trainings and screencasts, or those individuals with huge and high resolution displays.
They want $10/year for that. Which is basically what the previous version did for years and years without an update (check out the change log which shows how long it sat idle).
But it was 32-bit, so now you can’t use the old version.
I think this is my biggest issue with subscriptions. I don’t mind subscribing if apps continue to innovate. But when they stay stagnant, it feels like a troll under a bridge collecting his toll when you need to use it.
Most of the apps I subscribe to currently continue to push their apps forward in big ways at a consistent pace:
Drafts
Castro
Carrot Weather
Day One
Keep It
1Password
I think my biggest issue with subscriptions though is that if I stop paying for them I lose all access to the apps. The more I use subscriptions, the more I long for perpetual licensing like Jetbrains, or Agenda. Pay for a year of updates, but maintain your use without new features and bug fixes.
That business model resonates the most with me, and I will likely keep my subscription active because of the fact that they are doing lots of updates AND Apple continues to release software that breaks these apps.
Yup. To spend $80 for 2 years of Fantastical 3, which is a lot for a calendar app, and then have nothing to show for it other than the free version which anyone can use… that would be a tough pill to swallow.
I share a personal calendar with my wife. I frequently receive Office 365 updates that automatically appear on Office 365 calendar (not shared). I then duplicate those events to the shared calendar so she can see the events of the day. With V2, those identical events were combined in Fantastical. That is now a premium feature. That’s not worth $40/year. That lost feature is not identified on the website as a lost feature.
I am hit with a premium subscription solicitation over and over when I am testing out the interface. There should be a choice to turn off those solicitations if I have already evaluated and determined it’s not worth $40/year.
Bummer, those are only on the iPad, where I first installed the update. On the iPhone those “new” views (read as: requested with loyalty and patience for many years) remain a premium feature.
Turning your iPhone to landscape Mode just to see the week column view and suffering through the lengthy UI animations and the need to erfrag the device after the physical rotation always was dreadful.
Since the iPhone X this is even worse, due to the screens getting longer. Therefore the landscape view looks crammed to a level of being unuseable.
The real tragedy is that it truly seems like they tried to do this as best as they possibly could by giving people all of the features they had before. Several podcasts have commented on that aspect.
Buuuut… it was / is terribly confusing… and there were some bugs… and there was a lot that was not clear… and the price is very high for the App Store economy subscriptions.
I even talked to them on Twitter and said, essentially, “I went to your website and there was literally no information about pricing. There was no blog post. The information wasn’t there, which made it seem like you were trying to hide it… so I had to go to Twitter and RSS to find out who had written about it to get the details.”
They seemed to try so hard to get it right from a technical standpoint (bugs notwithstanding) but they totally blew the PR/marketing part, and now they’re getting hammered… despite trying so hard to be decent to existing customers. It’s a shame.
They should have done like Omni Group and released the apps as new apps and you get to keep the version 2 abilities by having Fantastical 2 still installed. Auto updating peoples apps is probably the biggest problem.
Wow, yes, three seconds to rotate and re-render on an 11 Pro is not good. That needs to be optimized. The skew rotate animation is not the best choice either; stock Calendar takes a better approach by rendering landscape, with part of it out of view, then rotating the whole view until the landscape view aligns to the viewport (and this takes one second.)
I wonder if the backlash would have been kinder if they had two tier pricing - $0.99/month for cosmetic, front end features and $4.99/month for those server side advanced features. I’d have paid $0.99/month without hesitation!
Conveniently, BusyCal on the Mac allows you to set “week view” to have anywhere between 7 and 14 days —I use the latter, and it’s indispensable. Also, I love that it can shade the day in week view to reflect sunrise and sunset times — when the Michigan winter blues starts getting me down, I look at my BusyCal and scroll to the right, to see the daylight portion “opening up,” with longer, brighter days on the horizon. It’s the little things
Personally I am fine with the subscription. I like their product, clearly they put a lot of work into it and deserve to be paid for their work. A lot of us that are “older” remember a time when most software was expensive, and while the culture now expects a free or 99 cent app for something we rely on and use daily, I’m ok with paying.
My sense from reading this thread is that most do not object to paying a “fair” price (obviously fair is very subjective for each user) but that many / most feel that $40/year (which will ultimately increase over the years) is too high for a calendar app. Ultimately, the marketplace will determine if the price is right. I for one can’t justify a $40 annual subscription for a calendar app., but I’m cheap.
I agree in general that $40 seems on the high end. As I have subscribed, I am not seeing what I don’t get, but the general verbiage seems to imply that all features from V2 are still avail for free. As they’ve pumped out three updates in the last two days, my guess is most of that’s to fix any glitches in that department as there were a number of posts that were implying that they could no longer see their V2 features. My guess is that they will also stop the constant annoying “upgrade now” suggestions.
As said, IF they see a huge fallout from the increase, they’ll need to get lower to remain in business.
On the latest 9To5Mac podcast co-host Zac Hall, a Fantastical power user, speculates that they’ve gone in on offering a top-tier product specifically focusing on a smaller base of power users who could use the new features (eg addressbook lookl-up when entering events, weather, etc) and the new focus on tasks (eg task creation as well as Todoist integration). For him the idea of paying the equivalent of the Mac version on a yearly basis is worth it for him, but he understands why others wouldn’t want to pay for it. (His co-host, Benjamin Mayo, is not paying for it - nor for that matter am I.)
Hall speculated, as did TechCrunch, that the app simply wasn’t paying for itself under the previous pricing model.
Although the app isn’t for me Lory Gil makes a decent case for why the app is great and worth the price (if you need the features):
I’m not sold either way yet (and am thinking this might be a record setting thread in terms of length!), but if we look at only the group scheduling function the subscription price isn’t quite as shocking.
I’d guess Doodle is the most apples to apples comparison to Fantastical in terms of the group scheduling function. Doodle is currently at $4USD/mo for the first tier.
To remove the Doodle branding it’s $6/mo. (Fantastical/Flexibits branding is VERY prominent in the emails they send out on your behalf, which somewhat concerns me that my recipients may mistake it as spam, etc. instead of a scheduling request from me.)
End of the day, I guess this is another vote for a tiered subscription. If you don’t need/want group scheduling or the other capability that requires a Flexibits account, a lower monthly price would probably save a large swath of customers from jumping ship.
I’m now giving Readdle Calendars a spin. So far so good…some good improvements on the built-in iOS calendar app. I think it might just fit the bill for me (at a much lower cost).
I acknowledge, however, that I don’t need many of the power-user features Fantastical has…so to each his/her own.
