I agree. The pricing for app subscriptions often bears little relation to the value they deliver.
Drafts at $20/year and Bear at $30 seem fairly priced. Fantastical at $60/year is pushing it, and is probably worth it only to people who have very full schedules or have to frequently arrange meetings with 3 or more people who have few openings. I’m sure NotePlan is a great app, but $120 a year is just nuts, especially since you have to pay for your own iCloud storage on top of it.
(I know some people with sufficient disposable income can simply buy or subscribe to any apps they want regardless of the cost, but I’m talking about cost relative to value for those who have to budget for software.)
I’d have no problem with subscriptions if they all followed Agenda’s model, or had functional free versions like Drafts. Without those, the ones that use proprietary data formats are basically holding your data hostage and forcing you to renew. (In its defense, iirc NotePlan uses plaintext files and doesn’t fall into that category.)
But one-time payments with occasional paid compatibility and feature upgrades (Bartender is a good example) is still a viable model that’s good for users as well as developers, and there’s a stronger incentive for devs to produce meaningful improvements than there is with recurring subscriptions.
The biggest software red flag for me is VC funding, which usually leads to enshittification, big price hikes, and/or what recently happened to Skiff’s entire user base.