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NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

blog.neeto.com

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Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#21

Post by lars_francke »

iambateman wrote: post #8

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.

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#22

Post by Hitton »

iambateman wrote: post #8

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.

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?

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#23

Post by simou »

ttoinou wrote: post #12

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 ?

Not exactly the same but when2meet is pretty good to let others know when you are availble

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#24

Post by ritwikgupta »

xnx wrote: post #17

Google Calendar recently improved appointment scheduling (including through a public page): https://workspace.google.com/resources/appointment-schedulin... Rough reminder for Calendly (and similar) that it's a feature, not a company.

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.

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#25

Post by rozenmd »

seltzered_ wrote: post #11
SkyPuncher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ironic thing is I know there's been other 100% bootstrapped 'calendly-like' software made in this space (over 10 years ago no less).

savvycal is a personal favourite of mine, even if it's a commodity service, good user experience isn't

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#26

Post by djbusby »

xnx wrote: post #17

Google Calendar recently improved appointment scheduling (including through a public page): https://workspace.google.com/resources/appointment-schedulin... Rough reminder for Calendly (and similar) that it's a feature, not a company.

You have to have tier 2 price (12/mo) or better at Google, feature wasn't in Tier1.

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#27

Post by zharknado »

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.

Re: NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly

#29

Post by spacebanana7 »

zola_user wrote: post #16
iambateman wrote: post #8

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.

$21k/mo is too pricy for a meeting scheduling platform.

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.

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