I pay for Fantastical and don't use the feature it's famous for
Fantastical's whole reputation is natural language input. You type "lunch with Anna Thursday at 1" and it becomes an event. It's the thing every review leads with and the thing the app is known for.
It has never worked well for me. I've tried, on and off, for years. I might be the only person on earth paying for Fantastical who uses it in spite of the headline feature rather than because of it.
What I'm actually paying for
Calendars I can layer on and off. I have my own calendar, my work calendar, the one my wife and I share, and a few subscribed ones. The question is never "show me everything" — it's "show me work and the shared one, because I'm trying to find an evening", then two minutes later something different. Fantastical lets me build those combinations and switch between them without ceremony. Apple Calendar makes me tick boxes in a sidebar like it's 1998.
The menu bar. The date is always visible, which sounds trivial and isn't — I look at it perhaps forty times a day. One click and I have everything coming up. For a lot of days that's the only calendar interface I touch.
The subscription
It stings. Fantastical was a paid app that became a subscription, and I was one of the people who grumbled.
Then I looked for something else, repeatedly, and didn't find anything with the same ease. Apple Calendar has caught up on features and still isn't as pleasant to use for the specific thing I do most. So I pay €69.99 a year, and I've stopped re-litigating it with myself every renewal.
The verdict
There's a free tier that covers basic use. Premium is €69.99 a year for an individual, and there's a family plan. If you juggle several calendars and constantly need different views of them, it's worth it. If you have one calendar and look at it twice a day, Apple's is free and fine — and you'd be buying a natural language parser that I, at least, could never get to work.
Part of the Mac software I actually use — nineteen tools, one write-up a week. Put together with AI, based entirely on my own use and opinions.
