This is a cool find! Calendly still has the killer feature of being able to check multiple calendars to find scheduling blocks. Syncing accounts on multiple Google Workspace instances at a time still remains a pain.
This is pretty but not robust. I'm speaking from personal experience because I recently built a scheduling integration for a client that is deeply in the Google Workspaces for everything club yet we still had to reach for Calendly because Google simply doesn't provide a proper API.
We’re using cal dot com currently, but the amount of bugs is just insufferable for a basic tool like that. I cannot login into my account since 3 weeks now, because their 2FA is broken.
We were on the lowest tier and recently forcibly moved to a higher one (from 5.20 EUR a month to now 7.80 EUR a month to 15.60 EUR a month starting 2024), and it looks like I have access to the feature.
Its incredibly hard to build a "product" and also run a services business. Ultimately the services business will take priority, simply because each deal represents significant $$.
I predict this product will become a sideshow, generate $50-100k/yr over a few years and be sold off, of course unless you start to focus on the product and get rid of the consulting gigs.
If you do turn into a product business you will quickly realize $4/mth is not even remotely sustainable when you add ANY kind of marketing spend (or sales/success people). Just too low. You cannot make it work. Your customer acquisition costs will cost 12-24+ months MRR, and SMB churn is brutal. typical 30%+/yr. Even at $10/mth/user its a slog. Which is why you see other calendly alternatives charging $10-30/mth/usr at min.
Churn is so high because the cost is high. Cost is high because they spend money on marketing and sales. They need to spend that money to have growth because product is the only thing we are doing.
You could be right that with consulting on the side neetoCal might not be able to grow. It's also possible that because of consulting neetoCal would be able to grow. We are not going to spend money on marketing on sales because we are earning so less. We will rely on marketing blog like this one and the word of mouth from our users.
Once we have reached a certain level and neetoCal is mentioned as a "Calendly alternative" in most discussions then the need to spend on marekting is even less.
Lasly we are ok with having a life style business. Important thing is to be alive and not die. That's why we are prioritizing being sustainable over the growth.
Your last paragraph is a good one. But these products do cease to be relevant every so often. It's a good idea to work on something else once you get this to the point that it's paying your bills, in my opinion only of course.
I feel like this is a great approach for bootstrapped and/or solo founders. Break the idea that some of these markets are huge defensible spaces requiring bootstrapped funding and higher teams.
Straightforward and clear-eyed writing, and subtle, almost cynical positioning perfectly suited for the HN crowd. That is: "This is easy stuff to build. Price is the main differentiator in this category."
>What about marketing and Sales? Won't that cost a lot? Sure, that would cost a lot if you are looking for hypergrowth. Then you need to spend money on ads. We are looking for sustainable growth without spending any money on ads. It means slower growth, but it also means fewer expenses for us. This makes us more sustainable.
Companies aren't looking for hypergrowth until they are. And that's when prices rise.
I think it's venerable to address the elephant in the room but then, in a room full of VC-funded startups, neeto _is_ the elephant in that it's intentionally straying from the public-company-or-bust path laid out in front of most tech startups.
Absolutely. We are optimizing for sustainability. The important thing is not to die. As long as we are alive and we are serving our customers well then we are in "business".
I do not understand why people keep building in that space. Not only is it a niche market, but it can be completely decimated by Google/MS adding a feature to their interface.
Add to that the non-existing costs of switching between these offerings. I was using the Calendly free tier, and when a feature I wanted was moved off the free tier, it took me all of 30 minutes to move to zcal (most time spent fixing web site, and email signatures).
Perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Maybe there's a social aspect that escapes me, but I would love to hear from someone building in this space about their motivation and long term goals.
I'm part of the team that built neetoCal. Here is my take.
I 100% agree that the switching cost from Calendly is pretty low. There is very little stickiness. I agree that Google/MS adding this feature to their calendar will wipe out a huge portion of the market.
If we take this analogy that Google/MS can add feature X then it would be hard to build anything new. They are gaints and they can build anything.
However being a really big company also means that they might not be able to pay attention to the requirements of individuals. They needs to be in the game where millions of folks are using it.
You can see that in google form. It's simple and it works. Still typeform, jotform and neetoForm are thriving. That's because folks want more than what google form is offering currently.
Have you considered flat pricing for lifetime access? You can easily calculate the likely value a subscriber is going to provide over lifetime with discounted cashflows. Then you can ask for that money upfront. Do you think that will be a differentiator?
At this stage of the business we don't think we can do a good job of calculating the life time value of a customer. So currently we are not considering lifetime access.
Cool, I've had "add a personal calendar appointment scheduler feature" on my backlog for months, and for some reason I just didn't want to do Calendly. Maybe it's because I'm pretty averse to overgrown SaaS?
I like their messaging and I'm more inclined to use a tool ran by a team/company like these guys.
Consider me a customer... whenever I clean up the backlog
What about a website caldendar platform where you only specify which day you will work and can be potentially contacted or not (so we have Not Working, Working Without Meetings, Working With Meetings on some hours) for a sync call ? This way it's not about booking a meeting but letting others know you're available. Does this exist ?
You could use cal.com (one of the competitors mentioned in the post). The use case you described would fit into their free tier.
The platform is made for booking but you can use it to show your availability, by allowing people to request meetings and then not accepting any of the requests.
FYI, Cal[1] is an Open Source[2] with a SaaS generous offering whose free version is adequate for most use case. No affiliation but a happy customer since its early days. It was, once, not able to compare with Calendly but has come a long way in a good way.
A Google Suite account costs 6 dollars per month, do you think this is 80% of that value?
Microsof Office 365 family includes 6 accounts 1TB of spacce, 60 minutes of free call in skype, word, excel, powerpoint, etc, and costs 10 per month.
A calendar application like this has 1/1000 the complexity and I would add 1/1000 the value. And even more, this functionality can easily be added by MS (google already did).
People who won't pay 4 dollars per month will never ever pay 1 dollar per month or even 50 cents per month. They will however argue for weeks online about how it's too expensive.
I pay 10/12 dollars per year for Bitwarden, I pay 36 dollars per month (6 accounts) for Gsuite, I pay 10 dollars per month for Skype, I pay for Netflix and Disney Plus, but you know for sure that I won't pay 1 dollar for NeetoCal. Right.
This is an interesting approach, but they’re awfully proud of themselves for charging 50% of what calendly charges.
The biggest cost of a SaaS like this is the cost of sales…so if they can convince enough people with this tactic, it’ll work. But RabdomBugCo is paying Calendly $20k/mo to have an expensive account rep team answer their questions and $1k/mo for the technology.
I understand that our "Teams" plan has more functionality than neetoCal's paid plan but we do pay 16/20 USD (yearly/monthly) per month to Calendly. The savings would be significant.
And the only reason we pay for their Teams plan is that "Round Robin" events are only supported there.
I have zero loyalty to calendly because I feel they are too expensive and would switch to neetoCal in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, neetoCal only supports 1:1 and Round Robin meetings and not "collective" events: many:one or many:many meetings.
Depends on the number of employees and degree of integration. If you're a large enterprise (say >10k employees) then changing your meeting scheduling platform would readily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee time.
Therefore, your exiting meeting scheduling platform should charge at a commensurate amount because they can get away with it.
Interestingly, this can create a market where new adopters use competitively priced, or even FOSS, whilst at the same time enterprises pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for legacy alternatives. Even when the legacy product is inferior.
Given enough time, the new adopters become large enterprises and the formerly competitive/FOSS suppliers become incentivised to take advantage of the switching cost and raise prices / change licensing. This opens a market for new suppliers to the 'new' new adopters and the cycle continues.
If it's annual, it's less than 1/3. As for asking questions: How often do you expect to ask about calendars. Wouldn't be small lean company better in answering questions?
Just an addendum, these BigBinary folks also helped build Gumroad, so you might definitely want to consider them for Ruby on Rails projects if you need consultants.
FYI: The company that built this is a heavyweight in the Ruby on Rails domain. They ship some quality Rails blogs which I enjoy reading. Being a Rails developer myself, it really helps to get to know about the new Rails features. https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-7-1-adds-activejob-perf... was one such blog. I was about to do some monkey patching to add this to an application I was working on. Highly recommend their blogs - https://www.bigbinary.com/blog.
I have such a small but annoying pet peeve about Calendly. It's That if I'm trying to copy my meeting scheduler link and go to just type c ... a... l ... into my browser, my calendars will always come up first, so I have to go all the way to c ... a ... l ... e ... n ... d ... l ... before the link.
Love the logic and intent but then I see people why people are asking about these subjects on ProductHunt:
There's two pricing plans "free and all the features" and 4.99/"user"/month if you want to remove their logo.
That makes it read as self-congratulatory - there isn't a plan for it to be a sustainable investment, and it's not clear it's that cheap either.
Either pole of "take $10M in funding for a SaaS" and "eh we'll be free 99% and figure literally everything else, from marketing to support to sales, on on the fly" is an extreme.
To users, the funding one sounds better: at least that maximizes quality, support, and engagement with the company until right-sizing occurs. 0 reason for users to care that it'll feel like "losing" to the founders or that VCs will be disappointed.
zcal is great, but is missing one (actually two) critical features that keeps us on calendly.
This is the feature... the ability to create a meeting 'poll' with all the members on your team, including external people, and it automatically takes into consideration everyone's availability.
The second feature is that I tried to reach out to the zcal support to ask if they had this feature and I could see they read my message, but I never got a response. So, having some sort of decent customer support is another crucial feature.
This seems very much aimed at teams on paid tiers at competitors (which admittedly makes sense).
As an individual user, I find their feature set (https://www.neeto.com/neetocal/features) a bit underwhelming - they present a number of features as things that really any scheduler should have:
- different meeting durations
- time zones
- custom availability
- cancellation/rescheduling
- buffer time
- integrations with Zoom/Google/etc (but not CalDAV, somehow)
- email notifications, OTP and SSL (what is this, 2013?)
Personally, I use cal.com, which has all of that, plus is open source and self-hostable. And it interfaces with CalDAV so I'm not locked into Google Calendar.
thank you for supporting us! The CalDAV integration alone took a ton of engineering hours because every provider has implemented this protocol differently
At first blush a freemium model seems incompatible with framing a product as a commodity. Curious if others have seen examples of that. I’ve never seen “free unlimited bacon,” but I have seen a lot of free samples (trials).
Seems really tricky to hit the ratios of free/paid users that would make this sustainable. Maybe if free is behind an invite-only volume gate or something. In any case, good luck! The consultancy/product blended model is a cool idea.
as a fellow bootstrapped founder, hats off to the NeetoCal team
I'm personally using Cal.com, it's free and I'm very happy. I'm also very biased because we interviewed the co-founder/co-ceo [1] and Cal.com uses our platform to reward its open source contributors [2]
what I love most about Cal is how young developers from around the world learn modern tech by contributing (and getting trained by the team) [3], support is crazy good [4] and the company builds in public, even their salaries and metrics are open [5]. I cannot not be a fan honestly
Tried few apps from this list and I'm surprised to find that at least 3 of those don't support phone only reservations... Some kind of businesses rely on phone mostly, email is almost not used ... and entering it is major inconvenience
Started reading then got presented with a huge popup overlay / ad telling me to subscribe to their blog. Closed the site. I did like what I started reading about not taking VC funding though - that is very refreshing.
You can use uBlock Origin to filter those out, though for a site that you'll only visit once, it probably isn't worth it.
These types of subscribe overlays, especially for a company blog with a product that aims to compete on features/pricing, are really unnecessary and annoying.
We are using Substack for our blogs. Substack is asking you to subscribe. This is not something we control. You can click on "Continue reading" without providing your email.
We tried to raise this with Calendly but they refused the request.
Their answer: "Thank you for reaching out to Calendly! We've found that manual confirmation of each appointment only increases the steps it takes to schedule. Not having to confirm/deny/reschedule a booking eliminates the email ping pong of scheduling!"
Which totally misses the point.
My calendar is not always perfect, sometimes I miss travel times, sometimes I forgot to enter things. I want to confirm my meetings.
Didn't the Basecamp folks (DHH, et al) start out this way too? I commend these folks, and for their transparency on this topic! If they can grow at the pace they wish, then good on them. Kudos and best of luck!
To clarify, i was commending the NeetoCal folks (on their transparency in the business perspective). I admire the slow growth approach, as opposed to the bog standard hyper-growth of typical startups. Secondly, I don't know DHH personally nor do I follow him; so have no idea if you are correct on DHH's opinions (but can't dispute your claim either). Also, are DHH and the NeetoCal folks part of the same org...?
Great to see the integrations (Stripe, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Slack, Daily.co, and Microsoft Teams) [0].
In general, is there an "open" calendar-sync protocol? Would that be CalDAV (often paired with IMAP mail accounts in my experience)? (But then, would that typically require giving email credentials to the to-be-synced endpoint?)
One thing that sort of surprises me is that the appointment-scheduling apps seem to have such a practical dependency on Google, if one wants to facilitate syncing with arbitrary external calendars. I get that Calendly has tons of integrations, and Neeto has a useful selection, too. But say I want to sync with Fastmail, which does not have a specific integration with Calendly or Neeeto (but which does support CalDAV/IMAP). The answer is to to mutually sync through a Google Calendar. (I guess a generic "data workflow integrator"--Zapier, IFTTT, or custom code for APIs--might solve this, too, but only at the cost of some additional party and some additional complexity for a glue layer to set up and upon which to rely.)
- I love having a slick scheduling web page interface as a service. Cool. But why no "generic" sync (CalDAV/IMAP or something better I may not know about)? (It seems weird to not have a more direct-line scheduling approach--is it just me?)
- For example, I'd like to have no Google dependency, but use Calendly (or, Neeto, or another scheduling service). But even when I don't plan/need/want/intend to use Google, much less for scheduling, Google still finds its way into being the most convenient dependency! Wow!
This wasn't meant to be a rant, so, apologies if it reads that way. I get that building a SaaS, the first integrations will be the ones that >90% of the target probably uses. It's just slightly boggling to me, though, that there seems to be literally no open-tech solution in place. Since even the 500 lb gorillas seem to not have it, it's not just a matter of scale/time. Maybe just literally not enough people would use it, period, I guess. Or does one of the many competitors do this?
So-- what's going on? Why's calendar syncing kinda convoluted? (Some reading online tells a similar story for a big company's mail product requiring specific sync tools as of late; so I think the issue is not limited to purely-scheduling apps or smaller companies.)
Does this plight register with others? To me, if the product/service truly is a commodity, then that might imply having a corresponding "common" open/standard tech-integration component--no? I suspect something about security, or maybe lock-in, or market size, or maybe ruthless focus on schedule-making (new bookings on top of existing ones) over schedule-syncing, but I don't know enough about it. I would think this might be an area where one of the competitors might be able to stand out, for a niche within the niche.
I'd be happy to be schooled on this, if anyone's willing.
> Maybe just literally not enough people would use it
I think that's the key. I have no idea how many people use fastmail or hey.com. And what percentage of those users need neetoCal type service. Now factor in what percentage of those user would come to neetoCal even if they need the service. If we do build CalDAV which is not a trivial task then we might put it in the "pro" plan. Now even lesser number of those folks would actually sign up.
Google Calendar is the first choice because it has the largest number of users.
Rough reminder for Calendly (and similar) that it's a feature, not a company.