This is the big one. The really big one. 10 years in the making. 4 new apps being simultaneously released. A server component that schedules your events with efficiency. And our Fantastical Premium subscription. Our we-know-it-will-be controversial subscription.

We don’t want you to think that we did anything without a great amount of thought or care. We want you to fully understand everything we’ve been working on. So, let’s start with Fantastical itself. The goal of Fantastical is to make your life better. More organized. More productive. More smiley. We’ve already proven some of this, with our glowing reviews and the we-appreciate-it-so-much awards, like our Apple Design Award.

But we’ve always had more to do. Features and designs not yet implemented. Problems that remained unsolved. So for the past few years, we’ve been hard at work adding all of these things we’ve wanted to add: A beautiful new user interface. Feature parity on every platform. Beautiful full screen modes on iPhone and iPad (and the Mac has never looked better). Synced calendar sets (🎉). Weather. Interesting Calendars. Proposals with automatic scheduling. Even better tasks support. And so much more.

But let’s talk about the thing that’s likely on everyone’s mind, the Fantastical Premium subscription. We want to help you understand why. The old days of selling separate apps is over. It’s confusing and it’s frustrating. The old days also had a new app upgrade every couple of years (although for those of you counting, it has been over six years since we’ve had a paid upgrade for iPhone, over five years for iPad, and over four years for Mac). The upgrade-every-2-to-3-or-so years model also meant each app was developed individually. That ultimately hurts development and innovation.

Unifying Fantastical into a single platform — one product across macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS — simplifies and improves the experience. It also means that everyone who values our work and efforts can now pay a single, simple price on an ongoing basis. This also means we no longer need to worry about the “every few years” upgrade old school nonsense. It also means we can now implement new features as soon as possible.

And we mean that. This is not about charging you a monthly fee just to get you to start paying monthly. We already have a big roadmap laid out where we can develop consistently and ship great new features and content on a consistent basis. We are looking forward to our new, predictable business where we get rewarded for our work as we do it.

Another other benefit of a subscription is a free version of Fantastical. That’s right, we now have a free version of Fantastical. It’s basic, but if your needs are simply to look over your schedule, add the occasional event using the famous and magical Fantastical parser, then you will be quite happy.

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.

There’s a lot of new stuff, so we’ll let you get to it. Although it’s fun and a bit ridiculous, you might enjoy our promo video to get you in the mood:

There’s also a bunch of tutorial videos that will walk you through everything that’s available in Fantastical. Be sure to take a look at those to get a preview of what’s available.

We’ll have more blog posts over the next few weeks to explain the new features of Fantastical and walk through how to make the most of them. In the meantime, we are incredibly excited for everyone to be able to see what’s in the new Fantastical, and for what we have in store for the future!