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

blog.neeto.com

81–90 of 94 posts

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

#81

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. 1. https://cal.com 2. https://github.com/calcom/cal.com

thank you @brajeshwar, we're happy to keep our individuals plan free forever thanks to the growing enterprise business

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

#82

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…

thank you for supporting us! The CalDAV integration alone took a ton of engineering hours because every provider has implemented this protocol differently

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

#83
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t knew they offered this! 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.

hey @ushakov, can you send me an email to peer@cal.com, can i look into your 2FA issue?

You already have my issue:

https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/issues/9533

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

#84
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wouldn't pay 4 dollars, but I would happily pay 1, which I consider a fair price.

I bet you 4 dollars you wouldn't.

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

#85

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 ap…

> 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.

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

#86
post #14

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!

Doesn't DHH have a history of chud opinions? Why are you commending him?

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...?

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

#87
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.

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

#88

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 ap…

> 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 fol…

Makes sense. Thanks!

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

#89
post #58

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 qui…

All good points. Here is my take. 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 sp…

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.

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

#90
post #39
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.

Didn’t knew they offered this! 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.

Thanks for sharing this!
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