Bummer, I like the update (even the minor UI improvements), but like a lot of people, these app subscriptions are adding up and Fantastical won’t make the cut.
Question: does anyone know of any popular mac apps that have moved to a subscription model and and have subsequently gone under (or gone back to regular pricing)?
How did you get t his view? Is this a feature of subscription?
Yes it is a premium feature. V2 had it as well.
How to turn this on?
I am not against subscriptions per se. I think they are a valid model. For me, it comes down to the price I am paying. Some subscriptions are even cheaper than the former releases+updates, like Adobe stuff. I have several subcriptions, if I think they are worth what I am paying for.
I bought Fantastical 2 in 2016 for 40 bucks. So, using it 2016-2019, it’s 10 bucks per year.
Fantastical 3 is 40 bucks per year. So, compared to the previous version and assuming a 4 year release cycle and asking the same price after that, it’s a +300% price increase.
As a Fantastical 2 user, it seems I am getting features for “free”. And looking at alternatives (BusyCal), they are way cheaper.
Dear Flexibits, +300% is not OK for me. Remember the initial subscription price of TextExpander, which got us (me) really mad, because they tried to ask as much money for a one-trick pony as Adobe was asking for a full-fledged photography suite? Based on the assumed 4-year release cycle, 10 bucks a year would be what I am willing to pay for in a subscription. We might discuss 11 or 12. But +300% is, honestly, not worth it. And even at 10 bucks per year you are expensive compared to very good calendars out there (BusyCal). I have very busy schedules and a calendar is a must-have. But others also do the job.
This is how I feel with +300%:
Why do I need a flexibits account just to demo the iPad version?
Well said.
The only reason I started using Fantastical is that Apple Calendar doesn’t sync with industry standard calDAV anymore. Which is a same in and by itself.
Asking $40/yr for a calendar is way too much. No matter how beautiful the app is. It’s still a calendar.
That being said, I’m happy with the ‘free’ version I got now (What do you mean, free? I paid $40 for it!). But if that’s the case for all Fantastical users they will be soon out of business of course.
Looking forward to some developpers building a nice and simple standards compliant calendar app for the Mac.
And finally, the first praise for the new subscription model is already in. Of course from the Apple blogosphere. You know, those guys that get sponsored by… Well, you got the point.
In this case (and many others) @MacSparky is regularly sponsored by the product he’s writing about. One could argue how objective the information is. At leat I take it with a grain of salt (or rather, I don’t trust the information at all).
I wish all the podcasts/blogs not only told us how great it is, but also adressed the fact that, assuming 3-4 year release cycles, it’s now a $120-160 app. How anyone buy “Fantastical X” for $160 in the App Store. No. So, dear podcasters/bloggers, less fanboyism and let’s talk about sensible pricing. And please don’t tell us “it’s just a Starbucks latte a month”. You could argue that for every $1.99 app going into monthly subscriptions. As of now, Flexibits is on my evil list. And I am saying that as a customer that spends several hundreds of $$$ (€€€) in subscriptions yearly. And honestly, I don’t expect much criticism on this move from the usual suspects.
Or let’s do another comparison: Office 365 Home is 70 a year. It includes a calendar with lots of features and on top of that a full-fledged word-processor, industry-standard spread-sheet, Power Point, Publisher, and included programming language (VBA) and 1TB online storage. How is a calendar (probably not even 10% of the code base) worth more than half of that? Office 365 is a subscription I have, IMHO the price point is right.
But market forces will work this out and cheaper (and equally good) alternatives will step in. It happened to Adobe, whose subscription I personally consider a bargain, when moving to subscription many alternatives (Capture One, PhotoLab) got a lot of business.
Totally agree. MS Office home I often pick up in black friday sales for £60 - which is used by 4 of us with all the benefits each.
1 Password again for 4 of us at whatever $60 is about right for what we get and peace of mind that the family aren’t reusing passwords.
Flighty was another one that was raved about which has a high subs rate of almost £50 a year (assume they need to buy data from flight radar), thought it was ideal for me as I fly every single week and with all the rave reviews from the apple blogsphere jumped in. Big mistake. I’d say its for regular but not frequent travellers and any feedback I gave was met with a thanks but no changes - even to stuff as important as online check in times. changes requested by the blogsphere are dropped in with great fanfare.
And here we are with a calendar app that wants to charge £40 a year. That’s nuts.
It should at least be tiered so that those that don’t want all the collaboration stuff for example (or weather) can not have it but pay 1/2 the price or something. A bit like Carrot does - although again the dev for that has to pay for the data so costings are more understandable there too.
I love(d) Fantastical v2, and am definitely NOT going to buy v3.
A subscription model for a calendar app is going too far for me.
Had all the features now, liked them, but absolutely not worth a monthly/yearly fee.
so: back to Apple’s stock calendar app. (deleting Fantastical from all devices as we speak)
I’m not a fan of this new update.
Personally, it’s not worth the subscription to me so I’m not paying for it. That’s fine, I understand it’s not for everyone and they do claim that existing users will keep all existing features.
Great, except it’s not 100% true.
I loved Fantastical 2 because I could just download it and give it access to my existing calendars on iOS and use it just as the front end. Now Fantastical has their cloud server backend that you must use in order to use the basic calendar feature of “inviting a person.” So even though Fantastical 2 was able to invite people using access to contacts on my phone, Fantastical 3 is unable to do that unless I give them access to my email accounts on their server. Fantastical 3 is no longer just a front end but is now acting as a backend.
I’m sorry but no that’s never going to happen.
Edit: Now that my post has been approved, I just want to add that at this point I have not even considered the pricing aspect, just the fact that to keep using the same features I could use before I need to go through their server. It makes no sense because when you download Fantastical it will ask for permission to access Contacts data, yet this data is not “available” to use for inviting people to events.
I get why they felt the need to implement a server backend, and I get that this is ideal for a lot of people. But the thing is, I don’t want a new backend. I just want a front end, and Fantastical isn’t one anymore.
Subscription is a business model that I accept: you decide that your product costs X per month, I decide if I’m willing to pay that amount of money
Must have account is a business model too, but the message isn’t that clear, motivation wise.
This is it, really. The market will decide if the business model works or not.
In my microscopic corner of the market, it doesn’t - but who knows whether I’m representative
I do not see Flexibits as evil and I do not blame them for anything. It is their right to do whatever they think is good for their business. It is just that Fantastical is not for me any longer. And that is fine.
Fantastical started in v1 as a menu bar application on MacOS. You were able to purchase v1 for twenty bucks (?) to enter stuff into your calendar using natural language. Just great back then. 
Then they released v2, they doubled the price and basically changed Fantastical to a full-fledged calendar app. I missed out on the upgrade pricing because I thought that it was not worth it to me because I just am not a calendar power user. After about a year, I eventually bought v2 because I thought that I needed it anyway (yeah, I know).
I eventually bought the iPhone and iPad version. I really do like the iPhone version. I have been using it regularly. Regularly means maybe once a week. Most of my appointments come automatically through web calendars (ICS). I do not enter those. Occasionally, I have to enter appointments, but it is not often and sometimes I use Siri or Shortcuts.
With Fantastical 3, Flexibits really seems to have released a calendar app with many features and many new ideas. I absolutely get that they have increased the capabilities of their application far beyond the feature set of previous versions. They basically have created a completely independent solution even with a server-side backend.
Flexibits thinks that their application is worth about 40 bucks per year. If I used Fantastical daily and maybe even more often than that, I probably would agree.
What I am not entirely happy about is the way how they spin it: v2 users do not loose anything with v2 (that is their message at least in the App Store and in the app)? I disagree. Apart from any features, they loose the ability to keep using Fantastical in the long run because eventually there will be no bugfixes and no support (“existing customers … will continue to get bug fixes and support for some time to come”) without paying 40 bucks per year. I totally get that you cannot provide everything for free. But there is a difference between paying 40 bucks every two to three years for a new app (I am referring to their blog post) or to pay 40 bucks per year for a subscription. I do not say that paying 40 bucks per year is too much, if you are a power user of Fantastical, but it is definitely too much for me. Text Expander, 1Password and the Omni Group did solve this problem with existing customers more elegantly, I think. Each of them differently: they offered lifetime discounts to their subscriptions or they provided their customers with options other than a subscription.
As a developer, it is totally fine to say Fantastical is 40 bucks per year now, and to say that you need that amount of money from now on. Just stick to that message, because basically that is what is really happening right now. Yes, as an existing customer you can keep using Fantastical for the time being, but if you want to keep using it, it is 40 bucks per year in a subscription and nothing else according to the Flexibits blog.
Again, it is ok. Fantastical has evolved from a little tool for entering appointments into Apple’s calendar solutions to a full-fledged calendar app with a server-side backend. This is a totally different app for a different type of user when you compare v1 to v3. Which means that Fantastical might be the wrong app for the user if the user has not changed in his or her needs for whatever a calendar app needs to do. Again, that is fine. And that is why Fantastical v3 is not for me.
Just a data point: My work calendar server syncs via CalDAV and I’m able to sync between the server and Apple Calendar on both iOS and macOS.
In Catalina:
For Reminders. “The upgrade process affects existing reminders in your primary iCloud account only. Reminders in all other accounts, such as secondary iCloud accounts and CalDAV and Exchange accounts, aren’t changed.”
For Calendars: "You can share individual calendars hosted in CalDAV with other people who have accounts on the same calendar server. "
Fantastical is installed on all my Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Macs, Apple Watch) and I love using it. I appreciate that as a v2 customer I keep all that functionality for free (and even got some new functionality for free, like non-OS Exchange support). What I don’t like is that they are pushing the subscription pretty hard, also to v2 users. I would like Flexibits to allow users to hide all Premium functionality instead of annoying (v2) users about this.
It looks like the new Premium cloud features are not for me. I don’t mind supporting future development of the App via a subscription, but €5,49 is just too much for my use case. If they would offer a $1/month plan to just unlock all local features (all views, calendar sets, templates, etc.) I would immediately subscribe.
For now I’m probably fine, I’ll continue using/loving the App and I’m curious what is on the roadmap.
And instantly produced a Fantastical 3 Field Guide. Independent assessment? Maybe not?
Katie
“Existing passengers on the Titanic are welcome to continue using it at no charge!”