I've poked around a while ago at some Calendly alternatives (specifically was looking for something that was cheaper than Calendly with most of the basic features).
I tried using https://cal.com for a bit but ended up just switching over to https://zcal.co and it has been great so far. All these other scheduling tools end up trying to do too much and always seem to end up a bit clunky and charge absurd amounts for it
I needed a scheduling solution that let me tweak a bunch of knobs regarding when I was available, for what, how much that cost, how that payment could be processed, my team, different locations, how full to book me, which notifications to send to whom and when, which data I needed to gather for each type of appointment or package of appointments, and, and, and, and before you know it I've given the developer 5 years worth of feature requests, and I'm just one of their customers.
Hey - one of the cofounders here. It’s exactly this.
I totally get the point that’s being made, but to be able to have a product which is good enough to sell, we have to be able to cater to the hundreds of features that customers tell us we need.
Everything we build is entirely community and customer demand driven, so effectively all of these features are in place to support every different use case that customers require as part of their scheduling needs.
We are looking at ways to make the app simpler, with the advanced options still readily available for those who need it. For example, some of our advanced features are hidden as apps which you install to be able to see their options. However if anyone here has further ideas, feel free to create a ticket on GitHub. We’d love your input!
Like how if an ER was run the way software is maintained, then, on a slow day, the doctor would order all the nurses to go in to the waiting room and bust everyone's knee caps.
Maybe the apps themselves are stable enough that the engineers working on them have to work on something. Is there an example of a SaaS product out there with more than one developer that isn’t interested in adding features? I don’t know of any.
I think the issue is if you do not keep adding features then some big tech company or larger startup will develop your feature in house and bleed your user base dry.
Imagine if you did one thing really well (like booking meetings). It would take Microsoft or google a year to copy the functionality into their own apps.
No one cares when money is cheap, but in a recession the first thing cut is going to be some single use SaaS app. For software that was sold with a license key it obviously isn’t as much of an issue, but the recurring revenue makes you beholden to continuously adding new features.
Totally agree. This reminds me of the Innovator's dilemma. The small company comes in, does one small thing really well, and then expands until it overthrows the large incumbent.
We as software developers don’t just get to sit back and blame the money people. We are incredibly incredibly incredibly guilty of piling on shitty features nobody wants because ‘we got that far down the backlog’, don’t want to move on to doing something else, and don’t know when to call it quits.
well, it's because they're separate groups is the problem. The money people don't pay the programmers to sit around and do nothing. so the programmers keep writing more code. if they could just say nope, it's finished, it's done, and step away, and keep getting the paycheck, they wouldn't have to find reasons to keep programming.
Grey area: Product managers/owners prioritize the backlog. Engineering has final say on what stories/issues they pull from that backlog based on their deeper knowledge of technical dependencies and similar phenomena.
Same as all the others, they're planning a premium tier with enterprise functions, hoping that enough happy free tier customers will help convince enterprises to sign up.
I created kalendme.com for this exact reason. Keeping it simple, clean branding and simple pricing for $4 per user per month also with a full API. I’m a solo founder but with a solid B2B deal powering a YC telemedicine company’s scheduling.
What ends up happening is that B2B companies prefer 'value' over 'simplicity' or user experience and end up building features without proper product design. This is required for them to expand their B2B offering and hence end up being 'clunky'. It's inevitable - much like most enterprise softwares.
Inevitable when your management only acts in short term best interest. Although less common, there are some people that also care about long term and common good.
take your hourly rate, plus the other person's hourly rate, let's say $100 each, multiplied by 10 minutes spent on emailing back and forth that were avoided, and out pops $33.33.
Calendly is only $12/month for their professional plan which saves you money if you even schedule only one meeting a month with it.
I pay Google $6/month/user for email, docs/sheets, video conferencing, and some online space, and I still think I pay too much because many of my users only need email for internal messages. $12/month/user for a random side feature is absolutely absurd.
I'm against any and all per-user fees because it's death by a thousand cuts and I refuse to allow that to happen. I will take the time to setup an open-source thing that does the same thing, even if the hourly rate of my setup ends up costing like five years of service JUST BECAUSE I'm that against per-user fees.
Would you rather a base, say $500/month, and then a trivial per-user fee? Say $0.50? Because obviously each user will incur additional resource usage, so you can't really be that against per-user fees when each user literally takes up X more MiB of space. Since you are that against per-users fees though, I'm fascinated to hear why.
On S3? $0.023 per GB. The data is most likely stored between RAM and SSDs these days. Aka on microchips made up of silicon. Which is sand. Which is all of, like, $50 for a literal ton of it. If you want to ask someone what about their mark-up, look at TSMC, their raw material is practically free, and they deign to charge exorbitant amounts of money for melting it in a (very, very) special way.
But you're not paying for storage costs, you're paying for the salaries of everyone involved with making the product, as well as the hosting costs, and some amount of profit to do with as they please.
Which is fairly pretty central to how capitalism works!
My earlier point is that they have enterprise plans, for those that don't want to pay per-user fees, but, uh, they're enterprise priced.
* This hour rate is absurdly high for huge part of the world. Try $20.
* This argument is used by every SaaS ever. If you want to use everything in that model, you would need 20 of them. At least.
* Slack is $7 a month. Office package starts at $6. Github starts at $4. These are huge tools that make work possible. Small random tool priced at the same level is expensive.
1) It's USD which implies, largely, that we're in the US. If we want to talk about global wealth inequality, that's a whole other can of worms. But, fair, $100 is rather high. Calendly is used by a lot of white-collar workers though and who generally make more than $20/hr. But sure, let's redo the math at $20 on both sides. $20 means $40 total, divided by 60 * 10 gets us $6 and change per scheduling, or 3 meetings a month to make it worth it.
2) Yes? I don't know about 20, but
1 project mgmt: Trello/Monday/Clickup/etc
2 if programming, github/gitlab/etc
3 an Office suite (MS or Google Docs),
4 Email (gmail/office365)
5 comms (Slack)
6 web hosting (squarespace/wix/godaddy/roll-your-own on AWS/GCP/Azure)
7 scheduling cal.com/calendly
8 healthcare
9 payroll (gusto)
10 bookkeeping (pilot.com or quickbooks)
11 401k
Those are just the ones off the top of my head. I'm genuinely curious to hear what I've missed!
That's besides the point though. Tools do a relatively specific thing. You can't use Slack to pay employees instead of Gusto, Slack doesn't even have a way to transfer money! So you need a tool that does the job that you need done. If it takes 20, it takes 20.
Just because a particular SaaS company uses that argument doesn't mean you have to buy their service. If you can do without it, then don't buy it!
3) Yes but that small random tool does a very specific job. I don't care if hammers are free and screwdrivers are expensive, if I need a screwdriver, I need a screwdriver and I'll pay whatever it costs. (fine, sure there's some point at which point you can reengineer something to use a hammer if a screwdriver's that expensive, but if you're smart enough to make that point you're smart enough to get my point)
Anyway, my real question is what is it about making tools that makes people so cheap? And not just software either, Harbor Freight has been making everything out of Chinesium which is ludicrously cheap, to Craftsman's detriment. If you go and see a movie you really like in a good theater, you're happy you paid for a ticket and ate the overpriced popcorn, when you could have torrented it for free at home and watched it on your phone. There's something about tools that brings out the cheapness in, at least me, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it simply because we need so many of them?
https://xkcd.com/2347/ is all too true, but then Dwarf Fortress and they became millionaires overnight! Not that I begrudge them that money, but just that like, human psychology is so interesting!
1) I work half of the globe from US. We've half of the contracts in USD, valuation in USD and use the same tools as people on your side of the pond (yay internet). Sending invites via outlook (desktop app, paid once) is free and usually good enough :-)
2) IDE (Jetbrains), knowledge repository (wiki,confluence, notion), on-call management (pager duty, jira SD), error monitoring (sentry) - just a few from the top of my head. AWS pricing and size of the offering is topic on its own.
3) it's not being cheap. At least not only that. Take a look at this summary [1] I stumbled upon recently. According to this calculation tools may account for almost 20% of recurring expenses in Sweden. Sweden is far from being poor. What's more important - you must pay, because otherwise you lose it (hope it never happens to my screwdrivers or popcorn). This is huge liability, that may stop your company from operating. Often really unnecessary.
3) Software devs are getting off lightly! If you need to do high-end CAD, Solidworks is $167/month with an $8,000 upfront cost. Looking at other industries, a general contractor's tools are several thousand dollars, same for an auto mechanic. Going even further, the "tools" for a bus driver (aka a bus) costs $500k; a pilot, $x00 million; a cruise ship captain likely tops the list, with cruise ships construction costs being over a billion dollars! What's the switch that flips through for tools, when compared to something like dwarf fortress, which made the brothers into millionaires as soon as they put it up for sale. They worked hard at it for many years to get to that place, but it's that people rushed to give them money to support them. No one's doing that for OpenSSL or Cal.com.
If you have to view things that way, that summary is bloated. stop paying for slack, use google starter for $6/mo instead of microsoft or google standard, don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...
AWS can easily go into 6 figures/month, so you could get a decent bus for that too, and maybe even a plane in some years of operation :)
I'm not against paid tools in general. My company pays for many - lots of IntelliJ licenses (at least XXk eur/year), jira server (hard to summarize over the years, but probably at least couple of cars worth) and many others, but we prefer "pay once and own it" model, because we updated when we needed. Sometimes we pushed this for later and spent cash for raises and/or additional people, which were more important than minor software updates. That's why I really dislike subscription model - you don't have this choice - either you pay now or you're out. Don't like new prices? Feel free to migrate for couple of months (while still paying).
> don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...
We actually host ton of stuff on-prem. Isn't nearly as bad as people like to frame it. Of course we have some subscribtions, because it's business not crusade, but in general keeping mandatory recurring costs low, proved to be good strategy.
1) thank you for that perspective. Mind sharing which country? I'm always interested in regional variances. The Apple Store deals with this by not allowing developers to set prices directly, and instead, lets them set a price point, and then Apple handles the foreign currency exchange rate and cultural differences about the price points.
2) This is a good list of tools! We could further into AWS and say there's a app server, a database, a pub/sub, a load balancer, and a payment processor.
I had been trying a bunch of Calendly alternatives until I came across zcal. It seems to have the perfect balance of functionality, simple design and affordability (I mean its literally FREE, so can't complain).
I tried using https://cal.com for a bit but ended up just switching over to https://zcal.co and it has been great so far. All these other scheduling tools end up trying to do too much and always seem to end up a bit clunky and charge absurd amounts for it