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Comment by dave_aiello | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to repeat that Fantastical does 95% of what Superpowered claims to do. And Fantastical has features that Superpowered clearly does not have, such as a really good natural language mechanism for event and task creation.

And subscription costs are less.

https://flexibits.com/fantastical

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To just get the menu bar widget there is https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

It's free. No paid upgrade or subscription. Just installed it.

There's also MeetingBar (https://meetingbar.onrender.com). Free and open source. Unlike these guys it doesn't collect data (https://meetingbar.onrender.com/privacy/).

Flexibits' weakness is engineering, though. They could get eaten by a competitor that works its way up to a full calendar with a stronger foundation. Fantastical 3's move upmarket in response to Calendar.app improvements hasn't been easy for them so I don't know how much further they could push themselves.

That's not to say that a new competitor will put Flexibits out of business, but if the market for calendar management expands, I wouldn't expect Fantastical's share to grow proportionally. So there's an opportunity.

I think part of the reason they evolved this way is because iOS has a shared calendar database which is surfaced by the API called EventKit, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit.

This also exists on macOS and WatchOS, but I think it existed in iOS first.

For a second I thought this was parody and “Fantastical” and “Superpowered” were fake products.

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