Fantastical

So why pay for a calendar when your phone came with one? Two reasons, mostly.

The first is typing. You write "lunch with Priya friday 1pm" and Fantastical works out the day and the time, and the event's made. Start with "todo" and it becomes a task instead.

The second is seeing everything at once. It pulls in Google, iCloud, Microsoft 365 and Exchange calendars, so work and home sit in one view. Your Todoist and Reminders tasks show up alongside.

Calendar sets are the clever bit. Put your work calendars in one set and the family ones in another, then flip between them. Free gives you 1 set. Premium gives you as many as you like.

Premium also adds booking links (they call them Openings), polls for finding a time, and a Join button that spots the Zoom or Teams link in an invite.

No Android phone app. If that's your phone you can stop here, because a calendar you can't check on your phone isn't much use.

It is coming. Flexibits' site says Android phones and tablets are due in 2027, and this month it posted a job ad on Hacker News for an Android engineer. There's no web version either.

The free version has one limit that really pinches: 1 invitee per event. Fine for your own diary. Not fine if you set up meetings with three colleagues.

A lot of the nice stuff is Premium only, too. Apple Watch, push sync, travel time and that Join button all sit behind the subscription.

And the typing can be too clever. One App Store reviewer found that putting a number in an event's title quietly changed its date. Worth a glance before you save.

The free version costs nothing and doesn't expire. If you only run your own diary, you may never need more.

Premium for one person is $4.75 a month on yearly billing, or $6.99 month to month. It covers Cardhop, their contacts app, as well.

The family plan is the bargain. It's $7.50 a month on yearly billing, $10.49 monthly, for up to 5 people. With just two of you it's already cheaper than two single plans.

Teams pay the same $4.75 a person, and get single sign-on on top.

There's a 14-day free trial of Premium. And paying yearly works out about 32% cheaper than monthly, which is a bigger gap than most apps offer.

Fantastical has 4.2 on the App Store from about 24,500 ratings. That's lower than you'd expect, and there's a story behind it.

In 2020 it switched from a one-off purchase to a subscription, and long-time users were furious. About 3,300 of the ratings are one star, and the reviews from that year are full of it.

Some came round. One reviewer left over the price, then came back when the family plan appeared and called it the best calendar on Apple devices.

What do the fans like? Typing events in, mostly. And having four or five calendars, colour-coded, in one place.

On Hacker News it turns up in lists of must-have Mac apps. It also turns up in a thread about subscriptions worth paying for, filed under cancelled, by someone who'd gone back to Google Calendar.

Which sounds about right to us. People who juggle a lot of calendars love it. People who don't are fine with the free ones.