Freemiums generally don't bother me, because they offer the chance to try a more expensive app out before committing to it. I have zero issue with paying for an app--I worked in software for years, and devs need to eat too!--but I resent buying expensive apps that end up not meeting my particular needs.
Freemium games DO irritate me, but the few I play are mostly structured around the idea that you can get everything in the game through patience if you're not willing to spend money. I'd rather buy the game itself and not deal with that, but I can live with it if I enjoy the game enough.
Ads, on the other hand, I have no tolerance for. I gladly pay to be rid of those.
Fantastical is a generally well-received and well-reviewed app, so I guess the takeaway here is that you can't please everyone all the time.
Not disagreeing that it's probably a quality app--a number of people here rave about it, and it certainly gets good reviews elsewhere. But I have a problem with their business model, no matter how excellent their app may be.
A $1-2 app is an impulse buy for most people; if you don't like it, it's annoying, but not the end of the world. Fantastical (and its closest competitors) are out of that range, so yes, I did actually reason through the decision to buy more carefully. It was the only one that did not offer a chance to try it out without commitment, and the only one I considered that didn't come in a universal version, which not coincidentally helped make it the most expensive option I was looking at. At that point, it was a no brainer to pick one of the others with near identical features...no matter how excellent Fantastical's fanboys think their favorite app is.
It may be the most perfect app ever created. But no, it won't get the chance to please everyone all the time, because the devs chose to take the fragmentation route and go for the money grab. Hey, more power to them, it's a free market economy and that's their choice to make. But as such, they guarantee they'll lose a certain percentage of potential customers who hate that model, just as some people avoid freemiums, and some avoid apps with ads.
The problem with lite versions and trials is that it prompts people to try out an app, and then submit useless feedback to the developer. They either want the paid features in the lite version, or they ask for the paid app to be free or cheaper.
Could you imagine getting 100,000 support requests like that a day?
Ugh...that would seriously suck. Entitlement nowadays is rampant. Obviously there are times I think paid versions are too expensive (see above), but it would never occur to me to ping the dev about it; I just move on to another app.
