Flexibits Premium (Fantastical & Cardhop) REVIEW

Fantastical and Cardhop are wonderful ways to merge calendars, contacts, and reminders while keeping you productive.

If I were to ask you what application you use on a daily basis across all your devices, you would probably reply with, “my calendar.” We all lead such busy lives and digital calendars have made it possible to connect and sync up with our family’s schedules in a unique and interactive way. And, even though our devices (mobile phones in particular) have a native calendar app, I have found that I always want more than is provided by that particular productivity app. This inclination is what drove me to use Fantastical from Flexibits.

Fantastical was the first product release from Flexibits (May 2011). I ended up adopting it for my iPhone in 2014. This year, I added in Cardhop, a contact management app, also from Flexibits, into my productivity app menagerie. As you might guess, the premium versions of these apps can get quite costly. This is why Flexibits began offering Flexibits Premium (May 2021 release), which unlocks all the premium features for Fantastical and Cardhop across all your devices. As an added benefit, Fantastical Scheduling is also included in the bundle.

About Flexibits Premium → Fantastical & Cardhop

Flexibits Premiums allows a user to unlock all the premium features of Fantastical — including Scheduling — and Cardhop across all their devices. The apps are available for the following platforms → macOS, iPadOS, iOS, and watchOS (Fantastical Only).

TLDR: Fantastical

Fantastical started as a school project and was designed to leverage iCal, Entourage, and Outlook so that users could interact with their calendars in a brand new way. It has since evolved into a robust app system that allows users to add all their existing calendar accounts directly to Fantastical so that all their events and tasks stay in sync.

Features (free version)

• Beautiful, clean, and easy-to-use calendar app allowing you to manage basic events
• Use the mini window to quickly check your schedule with customizable keyboard shortcut
• Full-screen day, week, month, quarter, and year views
• Full task support including Todoist and Google Tasks
• 3-day weather forecast (powered by AccuWeather)
• 14-day free trial for Flexibits Premium

Features (premium version)

• Includes Fantastical on all platforms: Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad
• Openings: Schedule events based on your availability
• Proposals: Create meeting polls
• Add Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, and Microsoft Teams calls
• Extended 10-day weather forecast with RealFeel and MinuteCast up-to-the-minute weather data (powered by AccuWeather)
• Browse and instantly subscribe to interesting calendars, including sports, TV shows, holidays, and much more (powered by SchedJoules)
• Calendar sets – quickly toggle multiple calendars on or off with a simple click or automatically when you leave or arrive, based on location
• Event and task templates
• Sync calendar sets and templates across devices
• Apple Watch app with Up Next and Weather (and works over LTE)
• Parser autocomplete recommendations for invitees, locations, and calendars/task lists
• Propose multiple times to easily ask people when they can meet
• Combine duplicate events across multiple calendars
• Invitees and availability lookups
• Respond to event invitations
• Default alerts
• Time zone override
• Favorite time zones
• Push updates for Google and Exchange
• Set event travel time and receive time to leave notifications
• Custom event colors
• Hide events without deleting them
• Add attachments to events on iCloud, Google, and Exchange
• Priority email support

TLDR: Fantastical Scheduling

Scheduling in a major feature set included with Fantastical premium service. It’s designed to make organizing meetings an easy feat rather than an unsurmountable labor. This feature includes:

• Openings – Set up available times and share a link. Feature will automatically block out slots based on your existing calendar events.
• Openings Keyboard – Allows users to share openings and meeting links quickly while in a conversation.
• Proposals – Allows users to see invitees’ availability so that users can find the best meeting time option.
• Instantly Add Conference Calls (Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex)
• Add break times and date ranges

TLDR: Cardhop

Cardhop is Flexibits answer to the traditional CRM system. The system allows users to search, add, edit, and interact with contacts quickly and easily with keyboard shortcuts.

Features (free version)

• A beautiful and simple menu bar app, designed exclusively for macOS
• Instantly works with your existing macOS contacts, nothing to configure
• Groups: quickly toggle contact groups with a click
• Smart groups: Create dynamic smart groups that automatically update based on specific search criteria
• Notes: a convenient and powerful way to add notes to your contacts, helping you to strengthen your relationships
• Recents: quickly interact with your recent contacts
• Birthdays: instantly see upcoming birthdays and easily send a wish on their special day
• Printing: Print customized envelopes, labels, and lists of contacts
• iPhone and Bluetooth dialing
• macOS Action Extension
• Dark and light themes
• Beautiful widgets to let you instant use and interact with your contacts (some widget actions require a Flexibits Premium subscription)

Features (premium version)

• Includes Cardhop on all platforms: Mac, iPhone, and iPad
• Relationships: View relationships between people in your Office 365 organization or between personal contacts through the related name field
• Invite action: Quickly invite people to a new event with Fantastical
• If you’ve already subscribed to Flexibits Premium through Fantastical, all premium features are automatically included!

Privacy Policy

According to the Mac App Store, Fantastical may collect the following data that is linked to you – Contact Info, User Content, Identifiers, or Diagnostics. The app may also collect data linked to location, which is not connected to the user. Cardhop may only collect Contact Info, Identifiers, or Diagnostics. For the full Flexibits privacy policy click here.

Pricing and Availability

Fantastical and Cardhop have free versions available with limited features (as outlined above). If you choose to use the free options of either of these products, you can get them individually for separate devices. If you, however, decide to upgrade to the premium version of either of them, you are subscribing to Flexibits Premium which affords you both products in addition to Scheduling. In addition to having unlimited access, users also have access to each of these products for all platforms they are offered on.

Flexibits does offer a free trial (14 days) for its Premium package. Subscriptions do auto-renew unless the user cancels them and once a subscription charge occurs, it is non-refundable.

All products are available for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and any web browser. The Premium subscription is offered on a monthly or annual commitment for individuals or families (up to 5). Flexibits does offer educational or military discounts (20% off list prices for 24 months).

Flexibits Premium is also available for organizations by contacting Flexibits directly. If a user pays annually, they will save around 33% off the regular list price. Flexibits is offering the Premium package at a discount at the time of publishing (approximately 30%).

NOTE: Flexibits has announced that pricing adjustments will be coming on January 3, 2023.

User Experience

Because Fantastical is a complete calendar solution, there is a bit of set-up required by the user in order to ensure that the system works the way it is supposed to. First you have to sign up for a Flexibits account. This is used to manage your subscription, sync calendar sets, templates, notifications, weather, and any other unifying elements of the system. After your Flexibits account is created, you can start connecting individual calendar accounts (i.e. iCloud, Google, Exchange, etc.) to Fantastical.

Flexibits makes the process as easy as possible by including a Help Book on their websites, which included step by step instructions as well as video tutorials. Once you have everything set up, using Fantastical daily is super easy. The same is true of Cardhop. The set up is a little different because it involves the user adding contact accounts to macOS first and then granting Cardhop security access to Contacts. The app is basically reading information from your existing Contacts and adding to them.

I’ve been a big supporter of Fantastical for many, many years. I love the user experience and overall UI design of the system and honestly, I think it looks and feels better than Apple’s calendar app. I’ve always found Fantastical to function better, too.

I have used it daily and it has always been one of my must-have, first-install apps on any new Mac I get. I spoke highly of Fantastical so much that I had tried to convince all my personal Mac friends they should be using it. Back then, there was a one-time fee that Flexibits charged for the premium version. Users had to pay it again with major upgrades but I was willing to do that.

I’ve never been a fan of the subscription model method for app systems like this. Earlier this year, I changed my tune a little when I considered that certain app systems — like ones that deal with security updates frequently — are constantly receiving updates and that requires developers working on the backend constantly.

Developers have to make a living off their work and only getting paid by some users who might upgrade to the latest and greatest version of the app won’t allow them to keep it going or at least keep it running smoothly. Flexibits is made of people making a product you use daily and they deserve compensation for it.

Flexibits does a good job of maintaining their app ecosystem and they continue to add unique features with new version releases. These are all good reasons not to let the subscription model of Flexibits Premium scare you away from the fantastic app system they have built.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a comprehensive CRM and Calendar system, Flexibits Premium is an ideal choice. It’s the perfect all-in-one solution for managing customer relationships and keeping track of your day-to-day activities. With its powerful features and intuitive interface, it allows you to easily keep track of contacts, schedule events, and follow up with customers quickly and efficiently. And with its cloud-based storage, you can make sure your data is backed up and safe, so you never have to worry about losing important information. All in all, Flexibits Premium is the ideal tool for businesses and individuals looking for a comprehensive CRM and Calendar system.

For more information, visit flexibits.com or Twitter.