I am not asking about subscriptions per se, that has been beat to death.
I am also not asking for a comparison as such between Fantastical and other calendars.
I’m just curious as to what are the few features that in your mind make a $40/year investment worth it to you?
Only those who have made that decision need respond as those who have not subscribed obviously don’t believe the Fantastical is worth the subscription.
I am asking this because at the end of each year I reassess my applications, deleting some, adding some. I then try to stay with these applications for the year to avoid the productivity sink of switching apps often.
I’ve been using the native Calendar app this year. It works. But, many MPUs and others swear by Fantastical. If you do, why do you think it is worth $40/year? Your thoughts will help me assess if I want to make that investment.
Honestly, it barely clears the bar for such a pricey subscription. But here’s why I keep using it:
It’s beautiful. I’ve tried using BusyCal but it’s a sore on iOS.
Time zone management works really great, and I need that (my life spans between two vastly different timezones)
The premium calendars are worth it to me, they have the holidays of both countries.
The iOS widgets are the best for my use.
However, it’s an expensive app and I cringe at its price. Especially consider the value you can get out of something like Bear which is a fraction of the cost. I am constantly on the lookout for competitors. If it was half the price, I would keep subscribing without asking myself those questions.
I personally haven’t found the need to subscribe but if I’m being honest with myself and HAD to subscribe to use the features I’m using now, I probably would. Fantastical if far ahead of any other calendar in my opinion. 90% of the time I’m using Fantastical in the menu bar and I would pay $40/year for that.
While I’m grandfathered into most of the basic features I subscribed for these additional features:
Calendar sets on iOS
One-click attending of online meetings (and I have had many of those due to working from home for most of the year, because of COVID-19 measures)
I normally prefer the free Apple holiday calendar subscription for national holidays, but that one is still empty for 2021, so the “interesting calendars” are currently useful.
I don’t use most online features and still wish they had a cheaper subscription for local-only features.
My employer enabled 2FA on my Outlook account and now I have to use Outlook instead of Fantastical. That’s such a pain… (I appreciate Fantastical even more now)
For what I use it for, I don’t pay the subscription but I do use the grandfathered basic features since I purchased on Mac and iOS. Fantastical is basically a pretty frontend for my Omnifocus Forecast, using Rosemary’s applescript for creating the omnifocus calendar…
I subscribe. After conferring with the pricing page, I can say the main reasons are:
Calendar sets (I legitimately need to toggle ~30 calendars that have several natural groupings)
Calendar set automatic switching
Duplicate event management
Hiding events
I also subscribed to get these remedial features (i.e. things Calendar already did)
Full access to calendar views
Watch support
Since I subscribed, I also came to value:
One-click meeting detect and join (I use this a lot)
Extended weather forecasts
Priority support
Things I thought would value but didn’t:
Travel time blocking and alerts
Outside of premium, I can say I also like the look and app size of Fantastical, speed of adding events (especially locations and / to add to various calendars) and the privacy model.
I do subscribe and get a lot of value out of it. I tried switching back to the default calendar earlier this year when I had some issues with Fantastical but found the interface was too limited and I spend so much time using a calendar I decided it was worth it for me at least. The automatic jumping into video calls has become essential for me every day and the mini calendar is something I use all the time. The iOS app is also much nicer to use than the default one.
Why not just get a copy of Fantastical and trial it for yourself before deciding? Calendaring is such personal automation that opinion can never replace hands-on experience.
New uesr here. Literally Day 3. So far love it. Also, am new to Cardhop which I can’t beleive I didn’t get to sooner and motivated me to try Fantastical. I have always had the challenge of juggling my home calendars (3 teens + spouse) and the calendars from 4 “work” organizations I am associated with, one of which is in the Microsoft/Office ecosystem. Fantastical, so far over 3 days, has wonderfully integrated all this craziness. In fairness, the changes to Office 365 have helpoed a lot where I can now more easily integrate it with the non-Office Calendars.
The app is beautiful. I love the ability to customize layout, such as #days of week (the 14 day view @MacSparky had highlighted in tutorials is awesome), alternate time zone on right side bar, and integration with ToDoist. And what a lovely widget that brightens up my iPhone home screen. Most importantly, it works great across Mac/iPad/iPhone.
The $3.33 per month ($40 annual) worked for me. Haven’t though too deeply about how much higher they could have raised price and still had me purchase. But that figure seems well worth it to me.
You might find that you can still use Fantastical with 2FA if you set it up with an app password and as an “Outlook.com” account rather than Office 365. I had to do that in order to work, and 2FA was recently implemented at my workplace (although fantastical didn’t stop working immediately when they did).
I purchased Fantastical eons ago. I am NOT signed up for their rather outrageous subscription plan. I certainly cannot see doing so as they can barely provide the basics, which I still have, never mind the bells and whistles they have tacked on.
I found the templates extremely useful when I had a series of daily appointments over 5 weeks, but with different times. The ability to duplicate the Title, Location and Invitees was a real time saver.
I have an active subscription as I want to support the developer and help ensure Fantastical lives on. I use it on Mac, iPadOS and iOS. I find value in having a well maintained app across the ecosystem.
I literally just paid my renewal a few days ago. I know a lot of folks are upset about the subscription model but Fantastical is very much worth it to me.
