Fantastical 4 and Windows Version
We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you.
For the Mac and iOS versions, it adds a Control Center widget and support for Miro conference calls, but otherwise the release notes show bug fixes. The price has increased from $40/year to $57/year. They are still honoring old, non-subscription purchases with the old feature set.
The short version is all of the core sync and business logic is shared with Mac (we reuse our Objective-C) and we leverage AppSDK + WinUI for the UI. Currently we don’t make use of Swift on Windows and don’t have plans at the moment to.
So far Fantastical for Windows is resource-hungry and unstable, despite its feature completeness. First time I tried to edit an event, it hung. Not sure if this resource usage is typical (memory usage is still climbing, up to about 1.2 GB now) but it’s more than I afford on my work machine, and way more than on the Mac; will try again in a bit I think!
They’re not using Electron, and it doesn’t seem like there would inherently be a lot of extra overhead from using Objective-C, so hopefully they can get the resource usage down.
Previously:
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FIFTY SEVEN MFING DOLLARS A YEAR FOR A CALENDAR
And, just like they were over four years ago when v3 came out, they're obscuring (on desktop website) and flat-out hiding (on iOS website) the total cost of the subscription. The only place it actually shows the full cost up front in a non-obscured (and non-hidden!) way is if you subscribe in-app.
Desktop Web: https://share.icloud.com/photos/009D17bzae5QXmUsZtdbJ112A
iOS Web: https://share.icloud.com/photos/08bJnCS0DcKAYKaEZTKS5Bf9A
iOS in-app: https://share.icloud.com/photos/04dTvR6EM2KbG4u2_uSKdxnGw
And I will reiterate the other thing I said in 2020: given the gap between v3 and v4, at $40 a year, they charged just shy of $200 for v3. Granted the time between v2 and v3 was shorter, but even if we use that shorter time+price increase and extrapolate to v5, it'll be a bit under $285. For a calendar.
None of this is how good businesses behave. None of this is how a company that makes an app that is routinely praised as one of the best on Mac behaves. This is insane.
Agreed. Flexibits are a prime example of one of the worst subscription offenders. I love the Fantastical app, but I don't like how they lock some basic features behind a paywall without any choice. For example, give us different tiers of "unlocks". I only want about 20% of the features that they hide behind the subscription. I'm not paying $5/month for things I won't use, but I would pay $1/month to get a few extra features beyond what the free version offers.
I'm so sick of this subscription creep. I subscribed to Carrot Weather years ago for I think $4/year which was reasonable. Now they don't even offer that tier, but so far they allow existing users to keep it as long as they don't cancel. If you want to subscribe to Carrot today it'll cost you $15/year!!! It includes extra features above the tier that I started with, but they're features that I don't need.
Other apps like Parcels package tracking used to be $3/year when I subscribed in 2020, now it's $5/year with ZERO new features. And this app is about 100x less complex than a weather or calendar app.
Flexibits did not tell Mac users they were funding a Windows port. Now Mac users pay even more, due to higher Windows support costs.
To be fair to Carrot, a) they have *a lot* of subscribers on legacy plans where they may be losing money, because b) every time they have to query a weather service, it costs them money. I believe $15 (or even $25) is a fair yearly price for a fantastically (ahem) made weather app because they actually do incur ongoing expenses just by a user opening the app. Flexibits don't, as far as I know. And of course, that said, $15 or even $25 is far less than Flexibits is asking.
I get the "paying for features you don't want" thing but that is a thing even with standalone, perpetual licensing, so I'm less upset about that.
