Sorry, i meant Fantastical.
The “upgrade” didn’t work at all. I got none of the features back, lost the week view, etc.
We subscribe to YNAB and only use the mobile app. You don’t need to touch web if you don’t want to.
Apollo had better not go this stupid route.
Apollo Ultra is already $10/year, though it has a $25 lifetime option (or $10 lifetime if you were quick like me on release day.)
Lifetime being 250% of the annual price sounds about right. That would put Fantastical at $100. They probably considered it.
Yeah I paid for the lifetime to support the notification server
Oh, so that will be why my bookmarklet stopped working. The (free) app still seems to work for me, though.
The moment you log in you get a free 14 day trial (which I used to rescue my recipes). But after that, you have to pay to access the site. I think the broken bookmarklet might just be a bug, though. They are prone to those.
I will die before I subscribe to an app.
What they could do is release a yearly upgrade and simply charge the yearly subscription price for that upgrade-- I would be down with that. The key difference there is if I choose not to upgrade, I get to keep using the old app without updates. There’s no obligation, just an option.
That said, I would not pay $40 for a single year of upgrades to Fantastical. If they sold at $15, I would upgrade every year.
To put it in perspective, Fantastical is $3.33/month versus Office 365 at $5.83/month. It includes every MS Office product and 1TB of OneDrive space. And I don’t pay for that, because I won’t subscribe to apps-- but I do get it from work and it’s pretty great.
I don’t ever use the website, just the app for reference during cooking and the bookmarklet to add stuff. When the bookmarklet broke I tried to open the website but it wouldn’t load. I thought the company had gone bust or something.
I assume the app also counts as logging in. But I dunno. The whole thing has been a shitshow.
The app has never offered me a free trial.
That just sounds like you don’t spend a ton of time in your calendar app, though. Plenty of niche software costs more than a year of O365.
For a lot of professionals it’s worth money to make their daily calendar use 5-50% less annoying.
I have my calendar app open on my laptop screen all the time. I have 7 meetings scheduled today.
Switched to MacOS calendar which honestly seems fine. Screw Fantastical, they can lick my balls.
I use stock calendar/Google Calendar now too, but Fantastical was a lifesaver when I was freelancing for quick appointment creation and the event hiding/filtering alone.
I installed the new release today and messed around with it. It’s looking pretty good overall feature-wise. I do a lot with Apple Watch and the complications are tempting. Performance is okay—it’s better than the stock Calendar app for location autocomplete but is slow to re-render a couple of key views, like your timeline after you create an event.
I haven’t tried to connect a calendar to their cloud service yet, but I like what it offers. I might experiment with the automatic meeting time finder to see how it looks and works. (Surprised that isn’t stock in Google Apps and O365 yet, unless I’m missing something.)
Some of the gripes dating back to 1.0 still exist. Not being able to default 25/50 minute appointments like Google Calendar is still a big missing annoyance. And of course the lack of date-based app icons on iOS is painful. That has to be the first thing they look for in every SDK release, haha.
I’d probably stick with stock calendar/Google Calendar because I can ask some very helpful people to schedule meetings for me, but it seems like a legitimate release with an ongoing service and not just a cash grab. I rate Fantastical a 0/2 for how many of my balls they can lick.
This week’s Upgrade briefly touched on the issue. The general feeling among the hosts is this is the hand Apple dealt developers. I don’t disagree with that. In an ideal world, Apple would allow upgrade pricing. They don’t. I am not sure how feasible it is for devs to lock new features behind IAPs.
Unfortunately, I don’t see subs ending anytime soon. Given how much works devs need to do each iOS release — especially a buggy one like iOS 13, it’s hard to give that away. The model of pay once, a lifetime of free upgrades isn’t sustainable.
One comment the hosts on Upgrade made I really do agree with is there isn’t a good solution for any of this. It’s just choosing which bad option you want. You are going to piss people off with subs. If they did upgrade pricing, people would be pissed at paying for iOS update fixes. Really, people are pretty much just pissed for having to pay for anything.
It is a no win situation for devs, it’s just in the case of Fantastical, the pricing is obscene.
There is a solution.
- Jan 2019: Release Fantastical 2 for $20.
- Jan 2020
i) Release Fantastical 3 for $20.
ii) Bundle Fantastical 2 and 3 together for $35. Anyone that previously paid $20 for FC2 will have $20 subtracted from the bundle price, paying a total of $15 and getting a $5 upgrade discount. - Jan 2021
i) Release Fantastical 4 for $20
ii) etc
How’s that different than a subscription?
That is not ideal, at all. You end up with a lot of apps that are just set to rot, with no updates, but show up under the developer’s account, and your purchase history. I have three versions of Tweetbot and when I do a reinstall, it takes me a minute to figure out which one is the new one.
What Stusser wants is the ability to not upgrade if the features aren’t worth it, and to keep using the version he has. Plus, I imagine making the developer earn his money for the upgrade.
It’s a position I can sympathize with, for sure. I am not thrilled with the subscription model and would rather just pay for an upgrade.