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Show HN: Convier.me – A Calendar Service for Developers
- jabo 6y agoI wish this existed years ago when I had to figure out how to programmatically send out calendar invites. There were some quirks with how Outlook handled them vs Google Calendar and it was a time-consuming trial-and-error process. Congrats on shipping!
- johnorourke 6y agoNice idea, but seems to lack timezone awareness, which puts me off completely. Maybe that's being developed, but the American date format with no timezone being described as "English textual" (say what?!) seems to be ignoring all the standards for date and time (eg. RFC3339[1]), yet other parts of the docs clearly show awareness of RFCs! If you're pushing events to people, presumably you know exactly when they're going to happen, but with this API you're saying "here's an event, just pick your own timezone!" Nice idea though, it'll be interesting to see how it develops. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339
- sverhagen 6y agoBut then in the Event section, there's a timezone ID and some talk about local time of the calendar. Maybe the other sections are behind :( https://convier.me/docs/latest/event-component https://convier.me/docs/latest/event-component
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoThank you for your comment. There is indeed the possibility to specify the timezone, but the documentation is obviously not detailed enough on that. I'll clarify that.
- matsemann 6y agoYes, I don't understand american/English dates and time. I don't know when "04/06/2019 09:00 PM" is. Is it April or June? 0900 or 2100? Let me send an ISO8601 time as all other APIs accept.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago"09:00 PM" almost universally (is there any case or format or app that does it differently?) means 21:00 in 24-hour clock format. Not 09:00 (in 24-hour clock).
- mikeyjk 6y agoAM / PM clears up the 0900 vs 2100 ambiguity, but agreed re; American date formats.
- zeeZ 6y agoFor me it clears it up only 92% of the day. I couldn't tell you when 12:xx AM/PM is right now.
- Fnoord 6y agoPM means post meridiem. That's Latin, but you don't have to remember it. If you simply remember the P means 'post', and the 'M' means the exact middle of the day (12 noon) then you know 12 PM is 12.00 (after noon hence afternoon) and 12 AM is after midnight or 0.00 (the hour after previous day's 23.00 / 11 PM). Then you just need to remember morning is AM, afternoon is PM, evening is PM, and night is AM. That's it. Yeah, I find 24H system easier, but its what my native locale uses, so I am biased... (as is everyone else)
- Swizec 6y agoThis is in fact so simple to remember that street signs in San Francisco, where AM/PM is native, use 11:59am/pm or 12:01 and never 12:00 to avoid ambiguity. Street cleaning from 12:01am to 3:00am, for example.
- Fnoord 6y agoOnly thing to remember there is: .00 means new hour. Which the number before .00 denotes. Caters to lowest common denominator. I had all this explained on elementary school (which was boring and slow as fuck) during English class, and we don't even use 12H system in The Netherlands. It is quite frankly as simple to remember as a logic (tho not necessarily common) grammar rule.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sdjcse1 6y agoWhere will this be useful? I don't understand the use case
- mjgs 6y agoThat’s exactly what I was thinking. My first reaction was ‘this sounds like it might be useful’ but I’ve read the copy and I still don’t fully grok where I would use it effectively. Having the curl example is good, but I feel like a few example workflow diagrams that show some cool things you build with it would be useful.
- mritchie712 6y agoMy guess: Say you had a CRM app where you wanted to let users schedule sales appointments. You could use this API to send the events.
- hobofan 6y agoIn the famous words of patio11: Charge more! (There also is outdated pricing information in your docs) One thing that would make this really useful is a frontend widget that abstracts away many of the common complexities that arise and right now still have to be learned by everyone using this API. E.g. learning how to correctly construct recurring events and implementing a minimal UI for it would still be a pain even with this API. Algolia and their instantsearch.js (and React, etc.) packages are a great example for that where you get the faceting display logic for free.
- yalooze 6y agoIf you’re looking for an alternative approach, I built this Add To Calendar Ruby Gem[0] which generates URLs for all the common Calendar platforms. There’s also this reference repo[1] which helps explains how to build your own and lists some other libraries in various languages. [0] https://github.com/jaredlt/add_to_calendar https://github.com/jaredlt/add_to_calendar [1] https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-calendar-docs https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-...
- cpursley 6y agoThis looks really useful. Any similar Libs. For Elixir or Javascript?
- yalooze 6y agoThe second link I mention has some JavaScript implementations, although I have not used them myself. https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-calendar-docs https://github.com/InteractionDesignFoundation/add-event-to-...
- RyJones 6y agoI commented on one of your issues about all-day events; it's interesting what a hack supporting them is.
- yalooze 6y agoThank you! Yeah, the ics / iCalendar part of it has a spec[0] and is reasonably easy to deal with. But Google, Yahoo and Outlook Web/Office 365 all have their own take on URL construction which can be painful! [0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545
- koirapoika 6y ago"Check the docs" button link on the landing page seems to be broken. All the best to the project!
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoThank you for your comment, I fixed that.
- paraknight 6y agoNot to put the project down or anything, but if you already have the ability to send transactional email, does this offer anything beyond what you could do with whatever library to generate ics attachments? Or even just generate links for various calendars? https://www.npmjs.com/package/calendar-link https://www.npmjs.com/package/calendar-link What would make me definitely use this are frontend components too, like a calendar component (e.g. Vuetify's one), or especially a Calendly-like self-scheduler like the ones offered by Nylas or Kloudless, but at that point it's basically a totally different product.
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoIn fact, not all languages have a library as simple as the Node package you are pointing at. Most libraries require you to use the iCalendar standard syntax which, for a single event, is accessible but becomes complicated for a recurring event for example. But for the Node package you mentioned, you are absolutely right.
- paraknight 6y agoJust out of curiosity, can you name one such language that doesn't have a library for generating/parsing iCal? (I assume probably the language you use for your product). For context, we use this in production: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ical-generator https://www.npmjs.com/package/ical-generator, but again that's NodeJS
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoI work mostly in PHP, and when I started this project, most of the libraries were very incomplete. Customer needs led me to develop a more complete library and it's only recently that I proposed this library as an API. But, yes, much more complete and easy-to-use packages have appeared since then, although they still focus on events and don't allow to manage tasks or notes.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoYou may not want to offer a free version. Freeloaders don't convert and they become a support burden whether or not you offer support to them. Once you want to shut off the free version, which you will, you're going to make those people who used your thing and didn't value it enough to pay you for it mad. They wont convert, they'll just get toxic, because they'll feel entitled to your free service. A free option isn't worth it. You made a cool thing. Charge for it.
- atian 6y agoAny publicity is good publicity. If people don’t want to pay they won’t pay, and that’s a deeper problem for your product.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoAre you speaking from experience? Free users don't provide publicity, and them not converting isn't a problem with the service. You told them exactly how you valued your service and that's what they expect to pay for it. Nothing.
- atian 6y agoThis is in response to toxic users. But supporting freeloaders costs money. I’m saying weigh your conversions. Your comment suggests to discount freeloaders entirely.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoThey're going to be toxic to you, in emails and on your support chat or @'ing you. They're going to drain your energy and make you upset. Nothing good will come from it.
- capableweb 6y agoBasically any popular SaaS in the wild today would disagree with your "Nothing good will come from it" comment as 99% of them offer some sort of free plan. It's really hard to start a service from 0 and get users to join the platform when it's new. Imagine then that there is no way for users to try out the platform before subscribing to it, uptake will be even lower. You don't have to reply to every chat and communication channel, especially if it's clear that you've already tried to help the user and it's not enough for them. Ignoring is a powerful tool many forget.
- atymic 6y agoI've built a free add to calendar link generator tool, and late added an API. Costs me about 30c a month on serverless :) https://calndr.link https://calndr.link Feel free to ask any questions.
- joefarish 6y agoThis looks super useful - nice job!
- tiborsaas 6y agoThe "check the docs" button is not working next to the API request sample.
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoThank you for your comment, I fixed that.
- supermatt 6y ago"English textual datetime" as the input date format? What could go wrong... For an API this makes literally no sense.
- forks34 6y agoIt’s enterprise not entreprise. Looks interesting though.
- cosmodisk 6y agoHave you submitted to Product Hunt yet?
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoNot yet! With the feedbacks I just received, I want to improve the API before posting on PH.
- joefarish 6y ago3 attendee max/request seems low for $9/month per user.
- bnt 6y agoAny chance you could convert pricing to $X per 1000 requests? My previous company needed something like this (we ended up building it our selves at a whooping cost) but our needs were 50k+/mo of calendar invites.
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoYes. Given the feedback so far, I will probably switch to a "pay as you grow" pricing.
- dsr_ 6y agoThe existing tiers seem fine to me -- but I would change the name of Enterprise and make a top Enterprise tier which simply charges 1c/request, perhaps with a minimum of $50 or $100/month billed.
- multimedial 6y agoAlthough I am looking for something like this,convier.me's example script didn't work for me: curl https://convier.me/api/event https://convier.me/api/event \ -H 'Authorization: Bearer YEAH_SURE...' \ -d 'event[start][date]=05/26/2019 08:00 PM' \ -d 'event[end][date]=05/26/2019 11:00 PM' \ -d 'event[organizer][name]=Tony Stark' \ -d 'event[organizer][email]=ironman@avengers.com' \ -d 'event[summary][text]=Endgame premiere' \ -d 'event[description][text]=Bring the popcorn.' \ -d 'event[attendees][0][email]=MY_EMAIL' (with API Token and email filled in of course) gives me HTTP/1.0 402 Payment Required Cache-Control: no-cache, private Content-Type: application/json Date: Sat, 09 Jan 2021 12:52:48 GMT {"error":true,"message":"SQLSTATE[42803]: Grouping error: 7 ERROR: column \"activities.created_at\" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function\nLINE 1: ...NTH FROM created_at) as month, EXTRACT (YEAR FROM created_at...\n
- mikaelcarlavan 6y agoThank your for your feedback. I fixed that. Sorry about that.
- nicolewhite 6y agoFYI I wouldn't expose internal details like that via your responses
- caseyw 6y agoLooks useful. I’m on mobile though, and the docs aren’t mobile friendly.
- tomasreimers 6y agoI love calendar tools and my friends can attest to that. I think I've built at least one calendar app every year for the past however long. I love the idea of a calendar API (another example is Nylas - https://www.nylas.com/products/calendar-api/ https://www.nylas.com/products/calendar-api/) b/c it means I could build for EVERYONE and not just a gsuite specific app (which is what I tend to do for simplicity of APIs). The problem I've seen with these is an inability to grow / monetize at the rate startups need to, and, while I love this, things I'm curious about are: 1. How big is this market? 2. Has anyone innovated on pricing here? 3. Are there really well-adopted calendar APIs you need to design for other than Exchange and GSuite?
- YesThatTom2 6y agoThis is a great concept! Best of all you have an obvious exit strategy: Twilio and its competitors would love to add this feature set to their portfolio: imagine a txt message that not only offers to sign you up for an event, but adds it to your calendar!
- YesThatTom2 6y agoTo be clear: the exit strategy would be to be acquired by twilio or a competitor. One will have the foresight to add this feature then the others will feel obligated to add it too. You can position yourself to be acquired in the first round or the second.
- densekernel 6y agoVery nice! Good luck. Lean site.
- systemvoltage 6y agoWhat's the point of that illustration on the right? What purpose does it serve?
- pmarreck 6y ago1) Name is terrible. Sorry. 2) Timezone and localization support has to be spot-on, and right upfront. Might I suggest having the backend only speak UTC and the frontend has a thin layer of JS that turns all UTC into the local browser time in the onload- This design worked for me in a recent app.
- bawejakunal 6y agoAmazing, just something I was looking for recently. Would love to see a little "Update requests" on developer plan though and maybe a few more requests per month as that'd allow building an end to to end product with some headroom for developer testing. Agree with above comments about price point being high. $9/month is high given the 500 requests limit per month
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