Image and video decision
Photo2Calendar+
A single experienced developer can build a useful replacement (OCR + date parsing + EventKit + .ics export) in about a week; the paid app's polish, widget/voice features and use of Gemini are the main things you'd forgo.
View on the App Store↗$2.99/mo
$36/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off32 h to build
$20/mo3 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 10 seats.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Upload image/PDF → OCR/extract text → parse dates/times & event details → present extracted events for review → save to calendar or export .ics
What it still won’t have
- Polished App Store UX, iconography and ongoing updates
- Built-in widget and Voice-to-Calendar features (app lists these features)
- On-device integration with Google’s Gemini (app states "This app uses Gemini")
- Cross-calendar polish and tested edge-case date parsing from a production app
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 10 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build an iOS app in SwiftUI that converts photos/PDFs/text into calendar events. Stack: Swift + SwiftUI, Vision framework for OCR (or Tesseract iOS fallback), a small NLP/date-parsing library (e.g., integrate a Chrono port or implement rule-based date parsing), CoreData or local file storage for temporary results, EventKit for writing to device calendars, and .ics export generation. Core features in scope: import photo/PDF, OCR pipeline, date/time/event extraction, editable event-review list, batch create events into the selected calendar, export .ics, permissions handling, and basic settings (time zone, date format). Out of scope: App Store submissions, widgets, voice dictation, and server-side ML hosting. Require: clear error handling, unit tests for parsing logic, and end-to-end UI tests for import→OCR→event creation flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 2 cited sources+1
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score82
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productPhoto2Calendar: Scan Schedule - App Store
- official productOCRForge: OCR Scanner AI Tool - App Store
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
