Is the Skylight subscription worth $79 a year? What you lose without it, and the cheaper routes

Here’s the short answer, so you don’t have to scroll for it.

If you only want the family calendar on the wall, you don’t need Calendar Plus. The calendar, the colours, the chore list and the syncing all work without it. Plus is worth $79 a year only if you’ll use the extras every week: forwarding school emails into the calendar, planning meals, or running a sticker-chart of stars for small children.

And if you haven’t bought the screen yet, the bigger question isn’t the subscription. It’s whether you need the screen at all.

What still works without paying

Skylight lists these as working with no subscription:

• Syncing with Google, Outlook, Apple, Cozi and Yahoo calendars
• Colour-coding by family member
• Day, week, month and schedule views
• The task list for chores and routines
• Custom lists, plus the phone app

That’s the core of a wall calendar, and it’s free. One caveat reviewers keep pointing out: only Google Calendar syncs fully both ways; the others are more limited.

What Calendar Plus adds for $79 a year

According to Skylight’s product page, Plus unlocks:

• Magic Import: forward an email or PDF and the events land on the calendar
• Meal planning
• Photo screensaver
• Star rewards for the chore chart
• Disney Mode

Reviewers also describe Skylight’s AI “Sidekick”, which scans a photographed flyer into events, as part of Plus. The first month is free with a new calendar, and one subscription covers every Skylight screen in the house.

Some owners resent it. Skylight’s own subreddit carries a thread titled “I feel misled by skylight and their subscription model”, and review sites have described the free version, a little unkindly, as a touchscreen showing a calendar you could already see on your phone. That’s harsh. Having it on the wall where everyone walks past is the whole point. But it tells you where the value is supposed to come from: the Plus features.

The new tier: Skylight Assistant

There’s now a third option above Plus. Skylight Assistant is a text-message family coordinator that sends daily rundowns and reminders. It costs $14.99 a month or $119.99 a year, includes Calendar Plus, and existing Plus subscribers can add it for $40 a year. Everyone using it has to be 18 or over.

So the real menu is: free, $79 a year, or about $120 a year.

What a family wall calendar costs over three years

Prices are list prices from each maker’s site in October 2026 (Skylight, Hearth, DAKboard). Echo Show prices move around a lot with sales.

Who Plus is genuinely worth it for

• You live in your inbox. If school letters, club emails and party invites arrive by email and you’d otherwise retype them, Magic Import earns its money.
• You plan meals as a family, every week, not as a resolution.
• You have small children who’d work for stars. The rewards chart is now Plus-only.

If none of those is you, keep the free version. You’re not missing the part that matters.

The no-subscription routes

An old iPad. Put it on a stand or a cheap wall mount, open your shared calendar, set Auto-Lock to Never and use Guided Access to keep it on that one screen. It costs the price of the stand.

An Android tablet. Same idea. A kiosk app such as Fully Kiosk keeps the screen on and locked to one page, for a one-off fee of about €8.90.

DAKboard. A web dashboard built for exactly this, on any screen or a Raspberry Pi. Free for one screen with two calendars.

Echo Show 15. Shared calendar and list widgets with no subscription, plus a voice you can ask. Amazon’s Alexa+ is free for US Prime members, otherwise $19.99 a month.

All four put the calendar on the wall. None of them gets anyone out of the door, and that’s the gap worth thinking about before you spend anything.

Where myna fits, and what it costs

myna turns a tablet you already own, an iPad or an Android tablet, into the family’s screen in the kitchen: the calendar, who still has chores, and a big button the kids can tap to call a parent. Where it differs from everything above is that it isn’t silent. Aunty, the voice your family picks, reads out the day and reminds the kids by name until the chore is actually done. She’s an AI, set up for your household. The same app runs your child’s phone, so the kitchen screen and the phone in their pocket follow the same house rules.

Since this whole post is about subscriptions, here’s ours, plainly. myna is free to download, and the calendar, tasks, family chat, voice calls and the kids’ phone lock stay free. Pro is S$9.99 a month or S$99 a year in Singapore, priced locally elsewhere, and it’s where Aunty’s full voice lives: reading messages aloud, reminders that escalate, translation for a helper, and live location. You get 21 days of Pro to try, with no card.

If all you want is a calendar on the wall, an old tablet and a stand will do it for $25, and we’d tell you so. If you want something on the wall that actually gets the household moving, that’s the job we built Aunty for.

Still choosing hardware? We compared Skylight, Hearth and the rest side by side in the $599 calendar on the kitchen wall.