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Cal.com: Open Scheduling Infrastructure
- avmich 4y agoMy number one problem with third party scheduling providers is that they want to have PII which is used for the meeting itself. I'd prefer that information to be only visible to the second party.
- efficax 4y agocould you say more about what you mean? surely the business needs your name and email
- avmich 4y agoI'd assume if I'm making a schedule for joint event with a second party, I can inform them about the ways I want to get in contact, directly - say, via email. Third party, which helps scheduling - that is, reminding and showing the calendar in advance - doesn't really need to know anything about me, except that I reserved some time slot in the calendar. Granted, that third party would not be able to facilitate the contact itself, but that's the price for keeping PII, well, private.
- baileypumfleet 4y agoAll we need is a name and email for your guest. All data is being handled in a way that’s secure and private (we’re open source, you can check the code that touches your calendar), plus for internal security we are SOC 2 compliant and 99% of the way HIPAA compliant.
- avmich 4y agoYou surely could be hacked, and while it unfortunately could be said about pretty much anything, this particular case doesn't seem to justify passing PII to the second party.
- arkitaip 4y agoWhat does open source mean when you have to use a hosted solution and "premium" names cost 29 usd / month.
- rekttrader 4y agoThey have a GitHub and you can self deploy it on your own domain... use their infra, pay their fees.
- Semaphor 4y agoI wanted to have a look, but the site lags horribly on my phone, so I'm not thinking the rest of the code is better.
- dotancohen 4y agoI noticed this too. The site lags on my Samsung Note 10 using Firefox.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoMaybe you need a new phone. It works fine on my 5 year old iphone.
- Karstographer 4y agoI see sluggish website performance on Firefox for Android. Chrome performance seems fine on a Note 9.
- EligibleDecoy 4y agoSelf-hosted here: https://developer.cal.com/self-hosting/installation https://developer.cal.com/self-hosting/installation
- candiddevmike 4y ago> Clone the repo into a public GitHub repository (to comply with AGPLv3. To clone in a private repository, acquire a commercial license) The AGPL won't save you from folks modifying/reselling your software. And if someone was non compliant, are you going to pay the lawyer fees to prove it? I wish companies would stop using "open source" as a growth strategy.
- honkler 4y agomust have costed a ton for that domain name I guess?
- alexzeitler 4y agoHappily using it for several months now after getting frustrated with calendly's UX.
- samsolomon 4y agoCurious what you dislike about Calendly's UX? I feel like the product's success is largely because they've used clever UX to solve a common, but difficult problem.
- hobonumber1 4y agoI feel like they are using open source as a marketing and growth channel. Even if you self-host it, there's no way to self-host the API. You have to pay to use it. So you're just self-hosting the UI. They can change the API at any time or kick you off it. Also the AGPL is a very restrictive license.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoAbsolutely. All these new open source companies are a bit shady. Supabase was also another one of these although I hear now their stuff is easier to self host.
- js4ever 4y agoAlso the docker compose in the repo is a mess and doesn't work... Clearly it seems to be a way to limit usage of the selfhosted version
- ezekg 4y agoOpen a PR and fix it?
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThe pricing tiers on the website are also misleading/incorrect (edit: may be outdated info). For example, the free tier has unlimited event type only for the duration of a trial period. After that it downgrades you to 1 active event type at a time. I've run into a few "bugs" like that, but it still works well enough that I haven't bothered with the difficult self-host for my recruiter booking calendar.
- Peer_Rich 4y ago> The pricing tiers on the website are also misleading/incorrect. For example, the free tier has unlimited event type only for the duration of a trial period. After that it downgrades you to 1 active event type at a time. hey hey, that pricing is long gone. there are no trials anymore, everything is that is PRO on calendly is free on cal.com
- Glyptodon 4y agoNot HIPAA compliant, or usable in a compliant way, I assume?
- junon 4y agoSelf-hosting can always be made HIPAA compliant if you do it right.
- Peer_Rich 4y agoself-hosting can be compliant, but the SaaS offering is at 99% completion for hipaa compliance. SOC2 was already done last month!
- primitivesuave 4y agoTo use this for telehealth, a US-based healthcare provider would need to sign a BAA (Business Associates Agreement) with Cal. Realistically, the security features you mentioned would only be relevant in determining the punitive outcome of a HIPAA violation.
- Peer_Rich 4y agoBAAs are not a problem once the company has HIPAA compliance itself
- deforciant 4y agothe problem with cal.com "open source" self-hosting is that they have made it quite difficult to run yourself. For example this https://developer.cal.com/self-hosting/docker https://developer.cal.com/self-hosting/docker actually doesn't provide docker images but you need to build it yourself because for some reason frontend needs hardcoded hostname. In no other app I have seen such limitations :) Also, an older version from a year ago just stopped working, couldn't fix it, couldn't update it either :D It would be good if someone made a fork with fixed setup and docker images for self-hosting :)
- junon 4y agoThis puzzles me, there are often cases where hostnames are baked into frontends. Also, not everyone wants to use docker, so it's not exactly mandatory to have docker images. Dockerizing most things is rather simple, anyway.
- saddist0 4y agoWhy does it need to be a fork and not contribution to this repo? There is no end of feature requests, but polite way is to appreciate what is already done by original authors and fill your requests as GitHub issue. Disclaimer: not affiliated to them, just find your comment disrespectful.
- candiddevmike 4y agoOne reason would be a CLA. Presumably to contribute to their main repo, you need to sign a CLA to ensure they can relicense this thing as needed. A separate fork wouldn't have that requirement, or shouldn't if it's in good faith.
- gumby 4y agoWhy would you not want such an agreement? It means the main maintainer(s) have standing if there is a license dispute.
- 4y ago
- alberth 4y agoIf you're a for-profit company, what benefit do you get by making your offering Open Core? Is it sales channel, with the hope of converting those self-hosters to paid customers?
- panphora 4y agoIt gives you the ability to market to developers and post on HN without actually making it easy to host the open source version
- jonahx 4y agoIt also assures customers who have concerns about the longevity of your company that, even if you folded, your product itself wouldn't just vanish. So it's a kind of insurance in addition to being a marketing strategy.
- phphphphp 4y agoAnybody with money to spend is going to be astute enough to realise that the burden of self-hosting is far above any potential direct cost savings, and so self-hosting becomes an option utilised only by those who probably wouldn’t be going to pay for it anyway. Essentially, it’s a pain-in-the-ass free tier.
- e-clinton 4y ago
- Uncorrupt4319 4y agoJust because it's open source doesn't mean it's better/worse than a closed source application. What's important is the ability to clone and to self-host your own instance of the app. If someone is concerned with privacy, why couldn't they just use Jitsi Meet? Someone help me out here.
- marckhoury 4y agoI’m very surprised UC Berkeley doesn’t own that domain name. They have a trademark on “Cal”, don’t know if they’d file a trademark complaint if this got larger.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eadz 4y agoYou only have a trademarks in certain categories. That is how Apple computer and Apple the record label were able to co-exist, until Apple Computer started doing Music..
- marckhoury 4y agoAh good point, you’re right. This is probably legally fine.
- e-clinton 4y agoA trademark doesn’t automatically entitle you to the domain.
- marckhoury 4y agoI know, I just thought they would have acquired it. My statements were somewhat separate.
- milliams 4y agoWhen signing up I get "Please double-check your email address". It lets me continue anyway, but I guess it's over-zealous about my address being on my personal domain rather than @gmail.com
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI appreciate that they allow you to submit it nonetheless. I was expecting to get blocked. My hyphenated address with a .me TLD seems to break a lot of signup forms, and many of them won't let me submit the form with a valid address.
- designium 4y agoThere's an even a freer alternative, not FOSS though. http://zcal.co http://zcal.co It also allows connection to multiple calendars.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Peer_Rich 4y agohey milliams, we recently had a spam attack so we implemented sendgrids email validation but made it non-blocking https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-api/email-address-validation-api/ https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-api/email-address-valid...
- elkos 4y agoInteresting the nextcloud calendar app we use internally in the organization I work for has a similar "book a meeting feature" which I haven't (yet) took advantage off. If someone is familiar with both cal.com and that feature, I would really appreciate a view of pros and cons.
- kornhole 4y agoNC has two apps: calendar and appointments https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/appointments https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/appointments. If your org is already using NC calendar and other apps, using appointments is great for allowing people outside your org to book you according to your preferred schedule and against your calendars. Cal.com has a few more features, but there are trade-offs. NC appointments is easily installed, integrated, and maintained within your NC install. Cal.com will require more work to install and integrate. NC is somewhat best in class rather than best of breed (The overall solution is great even though some of its apps are not as full featured). In summary, if appointments has what you need, you are probably better off sticking with it.
- simonswords82 4y agoDomain name is worth more than most small businesses
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thedangler 4y agoNice, One thing that is missing from all these appointment bookings api's and webhooks is letting us bring our own payment solutions. Webhook for creating a booking but not accepted until they pay. After creating a booking have them redirect to my payment page with a callback url when payment is finished? Lots of ways to accomplish this feature. NO I DONT WANT TO USE STRIPE!
- triyambakam 4y agoWhich payment solution do you [want to] use then?
- thedangler 4y agoI want to integrate my own, for my own services, for my own clients services. I own a payments agency and I write custom payment integrations. I want control of the payment flow.
- Peer_Rich 4y agoyou can select the setting "Require Confirmation" and then use webhooks to send your payment link via email or use the "redirect after confirmation" to put your payment gate and connect it
- thedangler 4y agoThanks for pointing this out. But I didn't see that in the webhooks or api. I didn't see something for pending.
- Peer_Rich 4y agohey, peer here, cofounder of cal.com. We're in the middle of writing a generic payment adaptor which will enable Stripe, PayPal, RazorPay, Lightning Network, ... should be live this quarter
- 4y ago
- Firmwarrior 4y ago[flagged]
- dsr_ 4y agoBigger question: why isn't it built in to Google Calendar?
- efficax 4y agoit is. https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11608416?hl=en https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11608416?hl=en but it's not very featureful.
- msingh_5 4y agoIt is built into Google calendar. But the gcal version has horrendous UX. It’s called appointment schedule/slots. https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11608416 https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11608416 I love calendly because: 1) it checks my calendar for conflicts with a link or suggest times in gmail 2) adds zoom meeting details automatically 3) avoids having to do timezone math I just send my calendly link and don’t have to discuss back and forth about who’s available when savings tonnes of time.
- ly 4y agoThe ability to just schedule a meeting with someone from a widget on their website seems to me to offer a complete different user experience than having to email someone and go back and forth over available timeslots, even if that back and forth is somewhat automated.
- wpietri 4y agoAbsolutely. For those who haven't used it, I tell Calendly the hours I'm available. It then lets people book any open slot on my calendar. It's so nice to avoid the tedious "how about X or Y" thing. It also offers more complex setups. So when I was doing interviewing I could set up a single link for a particular kind of interview. It would offer people slots where both of the interviewers were available and then have the interviewee answer specific questions up front (e.g., their preferred programming language to do the interview in). But I mainly use it for, "Yes, let's talk, just click this link and pick the time slot that suits you."
- mattfrommars 4y agoI have thought the longest to build a replica of Calendly as a practice. And this got posted on front page. Anyone know way a guide to make a landing page like the OP has?
- chatmasta 4y agoI wish. Page design is one of those things where you can feel like an expert when looking at someone else's page, but as soon as you attempt it yourself, you end up making a mess and filling the page with all your own personal pet peeves. I think the best advice is probably to start as simple as possible: no more than two columns with responsiveness to one column, no more than a few colors, etc. But also, I wouldn't be too hard on yourself comparing your own work to this site. Someone spent a lot of money on a three letter domain, and they probably spent some more on the design for it.
- sodapopcan 4y agoBetter yet, pick a few shades of grey ranging from white to black and a few shades of _one_ other colour. https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/ comes to mind. Also, here is a great video on choosing colour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq8LYj6kRyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq8LYj6kRyE
- yuchi 4y agoShort form: 1. Focus on advantages and benefits of your product straight on. 2. Do show your product. It’s hard and difficult to keep it up to date, but the value outweighs the cost. 3. Use short memorable phrasing, but expand as necessary. 4. If your product has nerd value baked into it (e.g. some powerful protocol that mainstream competitors do not implement) do make it a major feature but explain the benefits to the uninitiated (“we support JMAP, the more powerful alternative to IMAP that allows you to use X app and service”) 5. On the visual side: keep it simple and add a single gimmick, such a background pattern or a strange gradient. Reuse that same gimmick in subtler versions with color/shape/position variations. Always strive for readability, not effect. 6. Pricing must be easily accessible. Explain in simple words if exceptions apply (student discounts etc)
- e-clinton 4y agoThe domain is fairly new. It was called “Calendso” not long ago.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- interestica 4y agoa three-letter domain is quite the move
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoCalendly raising a $350mm Series B [1] has to be in the top ten peak-2021 moments. [1] https://openviewpartners.com/blog/calendly-series-b/ https://openviewpartners.com/blog/calendly-series-b/
- jack_riminton 4y agoIt's certainly up there, although crypto rock jpegs make it look positively sane
- adam_arthur 4y agoVC valuations have largely ignored presence of competitive pressures. Simply because for most of the past decade there was a much smaller pool of talent and fewer resources available to spin these things up easily. No longer the case. This is an app that can be cloned easily and has a low barrier to switching for existing customers. SaaS with high costs of switching are the ones with defensible margins.
- verelo 4y agoHad a chat with a big time VC the other day about a project, told “I’m not sure this is venture fundable”. Things like this make me think just because I’m not willing to lie and sell the hype that the true sentiment here is “you’re not venture fundable” Bootstrap life it is.
- grvdrm 4y ago
- rfolstad 4y agoSo calendly is worth billions? and cal.com has millions invested and 90% of hacker news readers could build both these products in a weekend or 2 why do these companies exist?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- codegeek 4y agoYour comment reminds me of the infamous dropbox comment "I can just build an FTP server in a weekend" (paraphrasing). Hint: Software is just one piece of a business even a SAAS business. A billion dollar business requires many other things to work.
- BoorishBears 4y agoThis has got to be one of the misused parable in HN's history. The Dropbox comment was missing the utility of a turnkey solution. It was like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.": techies missing the value of complicating things in order to produce a product that Just Works. This comment isn't doing that, it's questioning the resources that it took places like Calendly as it exists. Calendly has a moat in the fact that it has a massive network effect... but it's natural to question what exactly about that moat qualifies a billion dollar valuation, and the answer is extremely little. If Dropbox had been something you could build as it existed in a weekend it'd be one thing, but you couldn't. You could build something that had the same technical function, but none of the user experience. Calendly isn't that.
- codegeek 4y ago"but it's natural to question what exactly about that moat qualifies a billion dollar valuation, and the answer is extremely little." I am no shill for Calendly but a happy user and as far as I know, they are doing 100M in ARR. It is a lot more than "I can code this app in a weekend". Whether this justifies a billion dollar valuation is a separate discussion but for sure it is not that easy to do what Calendly is doing. Easy is not same as simple btw.
- TuringNYC 4y agoThanks for the tool. Curious why you only allow hours form 9am-5pm of subsets of that only, what if someone wants to book evening hours? I was ready to start sharing my new cal.com link but this was a showstopper.
- shreve 4y agoThat may be an issue during onboarding. I've got an account set up already and I'm able to edit my availability schedule from 12:00am to 11:59pm.
- hackish 4y agoI didn't change the default availability configuration during signup. However, after logging in and navigating to the Availability page, I'm able to create multiple schedules and time ranges per day as late as 11:59pm.
- baileypumfleet 4y agoThe other comments are right: the full availability page once you get within the app will let you set whatever hours you want. We will fix this ASAP though!
- TuringNYC 4y agoI figured it out, basically, the start-time is constrained by the end-time, which is why I couldnt change the start-time until I changed the end-time first. It wasnt obvious at first, but makes sense. That said, i do wonder if a better UI control would make the operation more obvious.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoI was curious about getting a premium username (@christina) but $29 a month (I misread and thought it was $29 a year, thank God my credit card company declined the transaction) is too much. Love the idea, but $360 for a premium username. Nah. Not doing that. Not for something like this.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoAnd the transaction did go through. I’ve canceled the recurring but I’m hoping for a refund for the $30 I spent for something I won’t even get to use (with the custom premium username anyway). We’ll see.
- Peer_Rich 4y agohey there. shoot me an email at peer@cal.com for the refund, also happy to give a student discount remember you can always get a free account with firstname-lastname or similar
- filmgirlcw 4y agothanks Peer!
- filmgirlcw 4y agoTo close the loop, they promptly processed my refund! Appreciate it and I wish the team luck, I’m just not up for paying $30 a month for a custom username, but I love having a good Calendly alternative.
- collin128 4y agoAlmost did the same, couldn't believe that it was $29 / month. "Premium usernames cost $29/mo. You can start with a non-premium username and then upgrade later."
- Peer_Rich 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blomqma 4y agoTried signing up using Google OAuth, not allowing any scopes and got the following error: ``` {"message":"\nInvalid `prisma.user.findUnique()` invocation:\n\n\nError querying the database: db error: FATAL: remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections"} ``` A bit too much info maybe.
- robertlagrant 4y agoJS backend eh. What is the world coming to?
- willsmith72 4y agoNothing wrong with a js backend. Letting your errors leak to the frontend though..
- KyeRussell 4y agoThe moment I actually sat down and played with one of those “isomorphic” “frameworks”, which was not too long ago, the whole thing immediately made sense to me.
- lelanthran 4y agoWhat's an isomorphic framework?
- robertlagrant 4y agoFrontend and backend written in the same language/framework.
- baileypumfleet 4y agoHey - one of the cofounders here. We’re experiencing our biggest spike in signups yet (see cal.com/open for the data), so our database got overwhelmed for a second. Rest assured, we’re on it :)
- sondog 4y agoI'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 https://cal.com for a bit but ended up just switching over to https://zcal.co 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
- ryanSrich 4y agoHave you tried savvycal.com? I've been using it for over a year now. Best calendly alternative I've found.
- swyx 4y agowhat did you like compared to cal.com?
- podoman 4y agosavvycal has a way better scheduling UI for when you share to other people. I agree that savvycal > calendly. I pay for savvycal.
- bedatadriven 4y agoAnother vote for savvycal, happy customer here.
- eli_gottlieb 4y ago>ended up just switching over to https://zcal.co https://zcal.co and it has been great so far Wait wait wait. It can sync my Google and Outlook calendars into a single scheduling service, and they're not charging me anything? What's the catch here?
- brazzy 4y agoSame 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.
- d0m 4y agoThat landing page is really amazing
- Eduard 4y agoAre the Rick astley month sheets static / non-interactive / purely decorative? E.g. I cannot scroll to next or previous month; cannot see a specific day's details? Or is some backend just down?
- baileypumfleet 4y agoIt’s decorative. Maybe we’ll make it interactive in the future, that could be cool
- neovive 4y agoFor those on Microsoft 365 (by choice or via your company), have you tried or adopted Microsoft Bookings [1]? I noticed that Bookings shares some of the core features of Calendly, but integrates with Outlook and Teams. It sounds interesting, but I haven't heard much discussion about it. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/sched...
- cuuupid 4y agoWe tried it, was super buggy and had display issues on smaller devices. FWIW we also tried cal.com and had equally many issues — the first week we tried self-hosting and it must’ve crashed half a dozen times losing a whole bunch of bookings. Nice thing is it being open source and Prisma based means you can just scroll thru the source and roll your own solution in a couple hours of dev work
- 9dev 4y agoThe actual nice solution would be to fix those issues and commit them back upstream, but hey :)
- o_____________o 4y agoMicrosoft still Microsofting. We starting using DevOps recently, aka Visual Studio Team Services, and some of our employees can barely get through the login process.
- chriskanan 4y agoLast I checked, it doesn't allow integration with calendars from non-Microsoft sources (e.g., Google), so it was a non-starter for me. After using Calendly for several years to offload that aspect of my life, I'm back to listing out times I'm available to folks in emails to try to coordinate meetings since my new job only allows Microsoft Bookings.
- nateb2022 4y agoMy school (at which I am a student and for which I work as an academic tutor) provides me with Microsoft Bookings, and that is how all my tutees book tutoring sessions. It's worked pretty great for me so far, and I haven't encountered any issues. It integrates nicely with Outlook & Teams.
- corytheboyd 4y agodamn how much did you spend on that domain?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ussrlongbow 4y agoHow do I know if username I picked is premium or not?
- Peer_Rich 4y agoit'll show in the input box when you write it
- zcesur 4y agogreat product with lovely people behind it! coincidentally, we did an interview with one of the co-founders a few days ago. dropping the links below in case anyone wants to learn more about their philosophy & how they navigate the oss/startup waters highlights (7min): https://youtu.be/gymNEH-skAY https://youtu.be/gymNEH-skAY full interview (45min): https://youtu.be/BKCuNhyQlGE https://youtu.be/BKCuNhyQlGE
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dijit 4y agoI found recently (via the sso-portal of all things) that Microsoft has a “bookings” product, which, while a little more ugly: can give you a calendly like experience for no additional money. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/sched...
- jackconsidine 4y agoI use this myself. Unfortunately you have to click a small "continue as guest" button to get to my calendar- not as pretty as Calendly. But like you said, part of the package
- getoffmyyawn 4y agoGoogle Workspace also have this built in now[0]. I've happily been using it for a while now. 0. https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answer/10729749?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answe...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- getoffmyyawn 4y agoIf you use Google Workspace you have a booking page built in now: https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answer/10729749?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answe...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jameal 4y agoCan people book without a Google Account? I set one up and went to the appointment page in Incognito and the appointment page redirects to a Google login page.
- getoffmyyawn 4y agoPeople without a Google account can indeed book. Might want to double check that you are testing the Booking page link and not the link to manage your own booking page.
- zackees 4y ago[dead]
- wanderingmind 4y agoI'm skeptical of services that claim opensource but never provide any easily accessible links to source code.
- joshghent 4y agoI'd quite like to move my wife's maths business away from Calendly. But unfortunately Cal.com doesn't support payments for events yet. So that will be a sticking point for now.
- thecosas 4y agoI believe they do offer payments, although haven't dug into difficulty of setup. https://cal.com/resources/feature/payments https://cal.com/resources/feature/payments
- josevalerio 4y agoMy team and I are about to launch Talk With Me[1] which would allow you to book video calls with people and accept payments for those sessions easily. You can claim your custom URL right now and we hope to launch in the next few days. Here's mine [2]. Would something like this fit your wife's use case? And aside from payments, what else are you dissatisfied with on Calendly that makes you want to switch? Thanks! [1] https://talkw.me/ https://talkw.me/ [2] https://talkw.me/@Jose https://talkw.me/@Jose
- moneywoes 4y agoDid you build your own video streaming solution or something off the shelf?
- josevalerio 4y agoWe're using something off the shelf to get up and running quickly https://www.100ms.live/ https://www.100ms.live/
- mike_d 4y agoDon't put symbols in URLs that need to be communicated to other people. I'd suggest registering TalkWithMe.com and using your talkw.me domain only as a shortener to redirect people to the main site.
- 4y ago
- SeriousM 4y agoSince we're already talking about various scheduling solutions, does someone know a project/product that takes care of repeating task reminders like cancelling subscriptions and renew a passport before expiration?
- gordon_freeman 4y agoApple Reminders native app
- fragmede 4y agoRight now I just set a calendar event (in Google Calendar) for the future. What's the repeating part? Typically I don't have to re-cancel my eg Netflix subscription once I've canceled it until I sign up again, at which point I set a reminder then. What I'm really missing is the quick add by string that Google calendar used to have. Eg type in "next thursday at 8pm" and it would do just that, instead of laboriously having to scroll to next Thursday, then create an event and set it to start at 8pm.
- hahnchen 4y agoI schedule an email to myself
- bricej13 4y agoI've got a side project that is a long-term reminders app. It has a long list of reminders included like changing the oil, test the smoke detectors, flipping the mattress, getting your prostate checked, etc. You could just go down the list and enable everything that applied to you. I kinda lost interest in it but one of these days I should dust it off and get in the app stores.
- SeriousM 4y agoThat sounds great! I plan to build such a reminder service for myself with additional infos like the subscription costs. How did you managed to show different categories/calendars and how did you do the repeating scheduling of events?
- la64710 4y agoOk HN mods please explain how this post gets 315 upvotes in 4 hours and shoots to the top of HN? I just don’t get what is so great about this except the domain name that this gets so many votes
- ezekg 4y agoHN likes open source things. The original submission title said "open source" but it has since been changed.
- techwhiz007 4y agoI am still scratching my head over the same thought. The title is literally the name of the app. What's the magic formula here?
- pvg 4y agoEmail questions like that in.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hkdobrev 4y agoAs a previous occasional user of Calendly I couldn't justify the cost of the ongoing monthly subscription for a simpler version of it which is set up and forget. Cal.com seems built with a better plug-in foundations and it's free for individuals with open-source code and open development process. What's not to like?
- spiralganglion 4y agoI've been happily using Fantastical for this over the past year. The native Mac and iOS apps are beautiful. And since, you know, we folk here tend to be a little code savvy, I just set up a server redirect from mydomain.tld/meet to the slightly longer Fantastical URL, and it works like a charm. Boom — branded URL, integration with a fantastic calendar app, nice flexible scheduling. Really happy with this setup.
- maniacwhat 4y agoThe whole product seems to hinge around easy links to book meetings, but usernames appear to be case sensitive. I signed up with a capitalised name, but trying out the non capitalized link, I'm told this username is still available and you can register it. Maybe I'm overly cautious, but this feels like this is a feature waiting to be abused.
- ElijahLynn 4y agoGoing off of your comment, I just signed up with /ElijahLynn (CamelCase) and it looks like I have both https://cal.com/ElijahLynn https://cal.com/ElijahLynn and https://cal.com/elijahlynn https://cal.com/elijahlynn available, redirecting to my profile. The UI displays https://cal.com/elijahlynn https://cal.com/elijahlynn, fwiw.
- klabb3 4y agoUnique links like this work well over trusted comms channels, like email or slack. I don’t think typo attacks are particularly fruitful, but sometimes you need to type manually, in which case you’ll break the link. They should probably make canonicalize identifiers. What I would worry about though, is tracking. If you can see calendar status via a link you received (or even guessed), you can follow that person forever. That’d be fine for public use-cases, like therapists, but I would never share my calendar publicly, even if the details are masked. A great compromise, imo, is to generate temporary links, that are hard-enough to guess. That let’s you avoid rolling your own permission system, while providing excellent privacy by default.
- singron 4y agoIf you want to do a rigorous job preventing these issues, you can try the skeleton algorithm from tr39. It provides a normal form where confusable characters are considered equivalent, which let's you easily find confusable identifiers in a database.
- pbreit 4y agoI used the link it gave me which seems fine: https://cal.com/patrick-breitenbach-6randomchars https://cal.com/patrick-breitenbach-6randomchars
- fencepost 4y agoEntirely possible that this is a stupid question, but I hope I'm not the only one who has it. One thing that's made me twitchy with everything in this class of services that's kept me from considering using them - are they working only with shared free/busy or am I correct in believing that you basically have to give them "keys to the kingdom" for them to work with most of the vendors? Maybe I just haven't paid attention (OK, definitely true), but I don't recall seeing a lot of discussion about most providers having good permissions granularity that would let me say "grant access to my M365 free/busy data but not appointment contents, email, Sharepoint, Onedrive, etc" or "grant access to my Google Workspace calendars X Y and Z but not to email or storage." Am I missing something and limited access has always been there, or am I correct in believing that granting the calendar access that these need also includes a ton of other access that people may not recognize?
- neandrake 4y agoOn Google Calendar as well as Fastmail Calendar there are options to create a share link for your calendar which only exposes availability but not any details of the events other than date/time/duration. It’s not granular other than that though. I use it to share my personal calendar with my work so I can e.g. schedule a doctor appointment with details and have that appear and affect availability in my work calendar - it just shows up as “Unavailable” with no other details.
- fencepost 4y agoM365 has something similar (ability to share a calendar with another entity (by providing an email address, which presumably triggers an email with a relevant link) with some granularity as to what's visible), but I think when I looked at one of these "shared calendar scheduling" options quite some time ago it wasn't looking for a sharing URL but for an OAuth connection (probably to be able to add appointments directly to a calendar). That made me twitchy enough that I bailed on the idea.
- fragmede 4y agoCalendly doesn't ask for Google drive or email access, and limits itself to calendar reading and writing, if that's what you're asking. Other, shittier apps may ask for more, but don't draw conclusions where they aren't warranted.
- monkeywork 4y agoI've been using it for quite a while to book podcast interviews - I like that it integrates scheduling a google meets room automatically. I do wish it supported more vid conf software options though.
- Peer_Rich 4y agowhich one is missing?
- ElijahLynn 4y agoIt is also an Open Startup > https://cal.com/open https://cal.com/open
- ElijahLynn 4y agoAll salaries are posted at above link.
- mutant 4y agoGoogle Calendar does appointment slots now too. Works great, use it all the time to let clients book time with me. I don't need Calendly, or Fantastical now. (Mac app that had a appointment webapp)
- reagle 4y agoI use and like CalendarBridge because it can also sync multiple calendars. https://calendarbridge.com/ https://calendarbridge.com/
- dokein 4y agoLargely unrelated to most of this thread: Does anyone know of a solution that allows people to book times, but only contiguous with other meetings?
- Luciatrutth 4y ago[dead]
- bigmattystyles 4y agoWhat FOSS thing is out there for scheduling resources, like a room, or even down to chairs in a room - or booking machine time etc…
- yewenjie 4y agoI used to have high hopes for Cal but of late its been an absolute kitchen-sink with every imaginable possible bloat feature. I wish there were a bloat-free easy-to-install open-source alternative for it.
- Peer_Rich 4y agowhich features would you throw out the window?
- bambam24 4y ago[dead]
- Peer_Rich 4y agoHey, Peer here, Co-Founder of Cal.com. Wow this has been overwhelming! Shoutout to all the nice people in the comments supporting us. Also thank you all for providing valuable feedback, reporting bugs and more. The beauty of OSS that everyone can contribute, participate and help. We're ending this day adding the new "badge of honor" of hackernews #1 to our README: https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/pull/6682 https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/pull/6682 Best, Peer
- elashri 4y agoI always find it annoying when I cannot register on a website with my custom email. That is the case here.
- Peer_Rich 4y agoyou can. the hint is non-blocking
- idk1 4y agoDoes anyone else hate that they're using the a rickroll as marketing? It's really put me off looking at the page because I keep thinking of the tune and expecting to be rickrolled. Maybe it's just me.
- tohmasch 4y agoWill there be support added for ProtonCalendar integration?
- TuringNYC 4y agoThanks for sharing this @nateb2022 -- I saw that you also have a Zoom clone which is set up as the default meeting option. This seems like a big leap, though I see the obvious advantage and synergy. How are you able to focus on two very different things as a company (one: calendar sharing UI two: video streaming)?