Fantastical 3.0 — Much more than just a calendar. It’s Fantastical.

Oh goody! Yet another subscription! Don't get me wrong, I know devs need to get paid, but what happened to a good old upgrade price?

Flexibits is asking me to pay a $60/year subscription for an application that doesn't appear to have any additional features beyond the application I'm already using and don't have to pay a subscription for??? No thank you. Fantastical 2 works just fine.

I’ve purchased every paid upgrade so far, but switching to a subscription model for the same features I already paid for is a mistake in my opinion. Especially since this is a calendar app, not a service that provides on-going value for over time. If you had released a paid upgrade, even at $60, I would have gladly paid for it. Sorry.

@macguitar Flexibits has now just joined the sh*tlist of apps and services that start off with amazing problem-solving and innovation and yet still caught up in this well-known and horrendously unsustainable business operations model. Unfortunately, it's a common milestone: the one big BIG bet: will they keep loving us? You build something cool. You put everything in pleasing the user and in support and customer service. Everything goes in there - "we'll research and develop later" - and they love you. Slowly, you start thinking that love is all you need.. until you realise that a one-off charge doesn’t turn your business to live forever. This is the when the sh*tlist (or sh*t-lost) moment downs: you start thinking about splitting that love and satisfaction -- that the user deposited with their first purchase -- into small strategic bits so that you can multiply against looming cash debility and unpleasant forecasts. You then bet that people will keep loving you, so much so, that they will simply accept that. As quietly as possible. You may have even planned for some loss. You believe that splitting everything into small parts, they will then gladly repay for a lot of it and, worse, disguised as a favour, an improvement, a GREAT thing for them. Like other users here, I’ve been a very satisfied customer who’s paid for every incremental upgrade so far to my needs. If I'm perfectly honest, I paid for ONE functionality - natural language processing. Other than that, Apple or Google Calendar is just fine and Fantastical isn't replacing Doodle, Things, Basecamp, my Weather app, etc for me. I’ll say it again: direct user apps and services have to stop acting as if they were high-scaled enterprise modelled solutions or even film and tv show streaming aggregators. Subscriptions for versioning after a fixed one-off charge to cover (re)implementation is just a bad idea and the worst of practices. Why? Historically, You WILL get replaced. Quickly or slowly, but surely. Great antagonising use case: Things. Probably one of the best actually. .. And you haven’t even noticed, but as soon as you put the subscription version out, I’ve already replaced you — without even blinking. You say “I guess it wasn't really love then..” You bet it was not. Tada.

TLDR: Don’t update, or purchase from this company unless you like paying multiple times for progressively less features. Why has this been a terrible launch?
 1. Existing Fantastical 2 users who had already paid per device now have to pay (again) subs to access features they previously had. 2. The following features have been removed from fantastical 2 users:
 ❌ day/week/month/year full screen view ❌ time to leave notifications ❌ apple watch viewing ( you now need to make an account to do this?! ❌ shared calendar change notifications ❌ push updates
 ❌ calendar sync ❌family sync - previously, one account was needed, however now, each user needs to purchase a subscription. so if you have a family, each one must sub. 3. Either the marketing team was not aware the old features were being removed. or they are just playing dumb. Either way, this is just awful execution and no one is getting answers. They started making a FAQ about the update when they saw existing customers were biting back. So what do existing fantastical 2 users actually get? 1. Weather in the app, for the current and next couple of days 2. constant reminders to upgrade 3. reduced functionality. 4. the pleasure of creating an account so you can use your Apple watch app again. Why are users frustrated/mad? 
1. People pay for fixed price as they wish to own the product.There's a reason they paid that initial premium over sub based alternatives. 2. Sneaky pricing, showing only the monthly cost and not yearly (on website). - $3.33/month-> $40/yr (33% save due to annual billing) - £4.99/month -> $60/yr on standard monthly. 
3. Fantastical has released this app as a forced upgrade to fantastical 2, thereby eliminating ownership. Has this happened before and are there good examples of better companies? 1. Strongapp tried to milk it's existing user base dry too. Then backlash occured and they realised that this was a bad idea. They gave lifetime subs to people who previously paid for a complete app. 2. Mindnode gave pre-existing paid users a lifetime upgrade whilst new customers will go towards their sub model. The new features are great, however they should have been released as a seperate app. If there is anything I've gotten wrong, please do let me know and I'll correct this.

Ugh… Long time user, loved Fantastical 2.0, now in the market for a new calendar app — any recommendations?

Throw another log on the fire of "longtime loyal Fantastical user lost". I'm not paying all this, especially at a time when the competition is better'n ever. Hell, I have BusyCal included in SetApp. It's definitely not quite the same, not quite as much polish. But is it Fantastical worth it? Hard to argue. I guess they did the mental math and figured bleeding 3-4× as much out of half as many users was worth it. Long term I'm not so sure, given the impact on the brand.

been using since V1, but hate that all software thinks it needs to move to subscription -- will pass on V3

So digging into this deeper, it looks like all the features from Fantastical 2, are available for free to me in version 3 (Unlocked for you if you own version 2) so no issue for me here, loving the refresh. From their blog - https://flexibits.com/blog/ "And what about our existing customers who bought our apps in the past years to get us to this point? Some have called us crazy, but we call it doing the right thing. All of the features from your prior purchase of Fantastical 2 will continue to work with the new Fantastical. That’s right: your new apps will automagically detect your existing purchase and provide a special unlock of the features you already paid for. This means you will continue to get bug fixes and support for some time to come, too."

I’m fine with subscriptions. I just don’t think the pricing is warranted. Most others seem to be against subscriptions, period. If this was $15/year or $2/month, at least that’s pretty low. Drafts 5 started at $5/mo. No way I was going to pay that. Now it’s $20/year or $2/mo. I still think it’s a bit high as the app was already pretty fleshed out at Drafts 4 which was one time paid to premium features. I think **$1-2.50/mo/$3-7.50/quarter or $10–25/year is an okay price point for a lot of these smaller apps. Maybe a higher tier that’s a bit more. In that case, if I’m subscribed to a dozen or so of them, that’s say around $30/month or $300/year. Not too bad. **I know, transaction costs get in the way of a dollar a month, but if the payment is through Apple, I don’t think it makes a difference?

New description: a free calendar app that charges you if you want to see your calendar entries.. :D YDTM

I was initially excited because I've been a long-time user of the iOS app and was ready to purchase this new outright for my Macs, but after seeing that it's subscription based; no thank you. I appreciate all you've done to create an awesome app but I think this is where my stop is.

I'm so excited to see that they've made it a single app across all platforms, supporting the same features. The biggest thing (for me) is supporting Google resources on mobile for booking rooms and the robust ability to see coworker availability. Thanks for the major upgrade!

A bit annoyed that they've removed time to leave notifications (something I already paid for). I'll have to switch apps, paying $40/yr for a simple calendar is too expensive in my opinion.

Disappointed by their Subscription plan, I bought it in vain. Also, the app seems bloated now. Going back to Gcal. Sorry!!

Some feedback: I'm actually just fine with the monthly subscription. However, I tried to upgrade and connect my google accounts and a whole bunch of separate google auth tabs opened in Chrome and Fantastical started to chug. I'm not sure if it's because I had Fantastical 2 and there were existing accounts that weren't ported over properly, but it was a mess so I just abandoned it. I guess I'll try again at some point in the future. Fantastical is a great product and I'm down to give 3 a shot.

„Some have called us crazy, but we call it doing the right thing. All of the features from your prior purchase of Fantastical 2 will continue to work with the new Fantastical...” Yea, it’s like madness, not to block features ppl already paid for. Charity basically. Btw. I’ve bought Fantastical 2.0 and (so far) have the features blocked anyway, so...

Looks great, but I am not convinced at all that existing users of the paid 2.0 version are keeping all the features they had before. I've updated and already finding features not active and behind premium feature. For the record, I am all for App Dev's getting paid. I would rather I wasn't upgraded and then the features I was comfortable and paid for disappeared.

I understand the need/want of going to subscriptions. Developers need to survive to continue, but it's the pricing models from some ISVs that don't match in my mind. I can subscribe to MS Office 365 for $99/yr for 5 user licenses. I use it every day. Another utility might want $40/yr. I use it only occasionally. The fact is most users aren't upgrading their core computing environment often enough to justify a standalone pricing model vs. a subscription. Services like SetApp make the pain a subscription model a little less painful to the end user.

Nope. I want to see ISVs get paid for their work as much as the next guy, but it's frustrating to see apps (like Fantastical) that provide only a locally installed app with zero costs to function properly forcing users to switch from owning to renting their software. Apps like 1Password do a much better job of balancing the purchase vs. subscription debate, which I very much appreciate (thanks, @dteare). Although 1Password pushes users toward a subscription, users still have the option of making a one-time purchase if they prefer. The difference between the two offerings is that the subscription service offers additional functionality via cloud services that require monthly expenses to operate (and thereby justify a monthly payment). For example, if you want to access your passwords via the web, you need a subscription. If you not, then you don't. Screenshot: Fantastical would be better off adopting a similar approach to 1Password: offer both subscription and one-time purchase options, then differentiating between them based on the features/services that require monthly costs to operate. For example, if providing weather forecasts requires flexibits to incur monthly expenses then make this a subscription-only feature. If not, make it available as part of both the subscription and one-time purchase offering. Here's the thing: If flexibits finds that Fantastical doesn't have enough features/services to make a subscription model worthwhile using the approach, then Fantastical simply isn't in a good position to ask customers to pay a monthly subscription. It's that simple, and this is the reason why articles that mention Fantastical's move to a subscription model have comments sections filled with angry customers. Instead of spending time trying to convince customers why they need money to do work (doesn't everyone?), flexibits should focus on new features and enhancements that warrant the cost of a subscription over a one-time purchase. Some customers will see value simply in being able to access Fantastical on all platforms/devices for a lower monthly price instead of paying higher one-time purchase prices on each platform, but an equal number of customer don't own an iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch and therefore don't want to pay a monthly fee for platforms they don't care about. Maybe @macguitar can weigh in?