Itsycal

Itsycal does one thing: it puts a small month grid in the menu bar with your next events listed underneath, reading whatever accounts macOS Calendar already knows about. Click a date, type a title, and the event lands in the calendar you set as default. That is close to the entire feature list, and for a lot of people it is also the entire requirement.

The licence is MIT and the price is nothing — no pro tier behind a wall, no account to create, no telemetry. It installs from mowglii.com or with brew install --cask itsycal and updates itself through Sparkle rather than the App Store.

Where it stops is editing. You can add an event and delete one, but moving something that already exists hands you off to Calendar.app. There is no natural-language parsing of messy invites, no travel time, no scheduling links, and nothing on iPhone. This is a menu bar viewer, not a calendar client.

If you run your working life out of a calendar and want conference-call detection, templates and shared availability, a paid app earns its keep. If what you actually need is the date, the month and what is next, it is hard to justify paying anything for that once you have used this for a week.