Carrot isn't charing over $40 a year for basic functionality of their app. The highest yearly cost is $30 and that's to get realtime lightning strike data, and they're very up-front that the reason they have to charge for some of this is because the data access they bring into the app costs them money. I struggle to see what Flexibits is bringing to the app that requires that much of a yearly fee (or any yearly fee at all.)
So I'm very undecided about this. My initial reaction was outrage - I'm a fantastical user and self-employed consultant whose calendar is of paramount importance. I spend a lot of time using it and looking at it on macbook, imac, watch, phone and ipad.
Still, $40 felt outrageous and I was about to delete the app and not go back. Google Calendar is pretty good, as is the stock calendar app.
HOWEVER...
I've just tried the 'suggest appointment times' function, and it's clear that:
- this is potentially a really useful feature for me
- it relies on a certain amount of hosting and server capability from flexibits
- it's comparable in price to other calendar service apps like calend.ly
There are other features that I suspect create a cost overhead for the developers - synced accounts etc - and so some ongoing cost kind of makes sense.
So I'm a bit less black and white. I'm in on the two-week trial and will see what happens. It might make sense to me.
$40 is still far too much - $20 would feel more appropriate, given that this is a calendar app - and I hope Flexibits revise their prices down by 30-50%.
