Fantastical Launches New Premium Subscription for Families

[Ronlap]

"Popular cross-platform calendar app Fantastical..."

2 out of 5 stars on German App Store.

Don't waste your money on this ridiculous subscription and instead use Apple or Google Calendar.

I remember when it first released and I was really excited about the "free text" recognition to book appointments. But over the years, I have found it to be less and less reliable with it throwing errors, not properly booking appointments (random times when there most certainly were times in the text string), having "overwrite" and "permission" problems with Office 365/Outlook accounts and not syncing.

Definitely not worth paying for.

 

[LogicalApex]

Yet how many of the naysayers here will pay five or six dollars for a latte at Starbucks?

This is a very flawed way of looking at this due to the subscription pricing model. You could make the weak connection if their previous pricing model (aka not subscription) was in place. In this case, they're not asking a customer to skip a latte for the month to pick it up, but to skip a latte per month into perpetuity. With enough of these subscription apps they are asking users to skip Starbucks or whatever else they purchase for leisure into perpetuity. Which is a much bigger, and negative, ask.

Developers have to figure out a sustainable pricing model as I can't see how this is sustainable. Especially in the current economic climate where many people are going to be crimping spending due to economic headwinds. I suspect many of the apps who've jumped hard into subscriptions may be fading away soon as a result. But they are free to do what they want with their app. It doesn't mean I'm forced to swallow these changes. I am entitled to complain though since they made changes (and removed features) to an app I purchased both on iOS and on macOS.

 

[Abazigal]

Yet how many of the naysayers here will pay five or six dollars for a latte at Starbucks?

I have been thinking about this corollary for a while now (especially when it appears that more and more people are using it), and I think it all comes down to perceived value.

People are willing to pay $5 for a cup of coffee that they will just pee out an hour later because the value they get out of that coffee (a caffeine boost that perks them up and lets them start the day right) is worth the money they put out. To put it another way, coffee is hired to do a job for which people gladly pay good money for. It also helps that I can taste, feel and smell coffee, and it just gives me pleasure overall. It's something tangible.

Conversely, water and oxygen are free, even though they are essential to life. And my guess is that software is often seen as being closer to a utility than a luxury.

How many people get pleasure out of using slack or a calendar app or some other subscription-based software? I think it comes down to software just not being valued as much as hardware, people not perceiving the job it does as being worth the money, and the value just not being communicated well enough.

Nonetheless, I think the value of software continues to be an interesting conversation worth having.