Show HN: Calenday, real-time collaborative calendars for trip planning | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Calenday, real-time collaborative calendars for trip planning

calenday.co

207 pointsjaflo73 comments

I rarely log into HN, but I just wanted to say thank you so much for building this. I was looking for something just like it a few months ago to plan a trip with some friends that I also wanted to view-only share with a couple others (with a simple link - no account requirements). I was amazed how hard it was to find something like it and how you couldn’t really do that with Google Calendar. Don’t remember exactly what the issue was with other sites I found, but just know I will ABSOLUTELY be using Calenday for all of my collaborative trip planning needs going forward. If you add any other features I can’t wait to see them (and if you leave the site as is, I might be even happier in the long run).

Best of luck!

Thank you for the kind words! I was thinking the same thing, I didn't really find a good solution for group trips and also wanted something where I can send a link after the trip to friends that wanted to go to the same place. If you recall the issues with the other sites, do let me know! I am interested to hear.

Curious about how you found calenday...finding any service with such specific requirements must have been difficult, from my experience at least

Hi HN!

I built this website after having to recreate the same Google Sheets template over and over for different trips. This is basically Google Docs for calendars along with some other helpful features like voting and categories for trip ideas.

The website itself was built using SvelteKit with Firebase for the database and authentication, all hosted on Vercel.

Feel free to ask anything!

how did you manage real time collaboration in sveltekit? are relying completely on firebase?

Correct, yes, I subscribe to the Firebase Cloud Firestore events and update a Svelte store whenever something changes. This way I only need to set up the connections once and every Svelte component can just subscribe to updates to the store.

Writing is more challenging, I haven't found a nice solution so I resort to making calls with the Firebase SDK directly (but those updates are then surfaced nicely again through the store).

Plans for monetization?

None right now, but I was considering having a freemium model and charge for additional customization and features that do cost more like location-aware events.

Thanks for sharing.

Very trivial feedback here: Calendly has gotten pretty prominent and your app’s name is so similar that I misread it as Calendly (and wondered “why is Calendly doing Show HN and what’s this about trip planning?”)

That's a good move by OP. Too bad for Calendly. I can't think of a reasonable argument that it's trademark infringement. A portmanteau with day is quite different from a -ly suffix. Levenshtein distance is irrelevant.

When the law for well funded companies is basically “shoot first and ask questions later” - and it is - then semantic arguments don’t matter. If it seems similar, it is similar.

Suggestion: the Share form should perform an invite. Instead it tells me "This email address does not belong to a registered user account". Makes recruiting your friends and family a bit tougher!

I was too lazy to implement this at first and was also afraid of abuse, but this is a good idea, will work on it!

Hi,

great project, and looks very neat :)

I would be very curious to hear about any difficulties when implementing actual collaborative editing. Did you have to go into CRDTs and friends?

Cheers!

Thank you! I actually kind of cheated and didn't have to implement any of that myself because Firebase took care of it. But when I was considering how to build Calenday, those were on my mind. I had read about CRDTs on Figma's blog (https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...) and was considering using something like this to ease the burden on implementation: https://github.com/automerge/automerge

Thanks for the links! :) I will look into automerge!

This is interesting, but for me the barrier to entry is too high for me to try it out absent an urgent need.

Right now I'm thinking about visiting family sometime this summer and want to figure out the best time, so some sort of joint calendar might be good. But I can solve this problem adequately the usual way. I read through the front page and thought, "Oh, maybe!" But then I got to "Sign up or log in" and that was enough of a barrier that I closed the window.

The way to get me to take the next step would be to let me try the product anonymously, with just a unique link. Maybe a link that I can forward, as with Google Docs, to anybody I want to be involved. If I find it useful, then I'd be much more willing to jump through signup and account-linking hoops.

Neat!

A collaborative itinerary seems really useful.

Any plans to add or design features around coordinating flights for these types of trips? In my experience this tends to be the hardest thing to keep track of collaboratively. I've actually also seen friends using spreadsheets to track flights. It could be cool to add a feature that shows when everyone is landing or leaving.

That's a really cool idea! A friend mentioned something similar. I will look into that, I think the UX might be hard to nail down.

I am not sure on how to best indicate it, but it might be interesting to show availability of each person as a shaded background. Darker shade would mean more people present. I will put it on my backlog, thank you!

A couple ideas come to mind solving slightly different problems

1. Flight discovery

It would be interesting to propose a date and (optional) arrival time and location and have the service look up like the top 5 cheapest flights or something and link to a purchasing site (affiliate link kickbacks might be a viable way to generate revenue here but I have effectively zero context/experience here).

The rest of the user story/flow (aka what happens when someone chooses to purchase a flight from the list) is interesting here but simpler is probably better (e.g. just have them follow the flow in point 2 below) unless there's some simple way for Calenday to know which flight you bought and surface that to collaborators.

2. Flight coordination

It would be nice if the trip "vanguard" or leader could put in their flight details and have that shown with some rich information from some flight tracker API. Might be able to simplify the flight details input portion with some kind of flight tracker API (e.g. Airline, flight number, date and then it would pull the departure/boarding times, terminals, gates, or whatever is available).

Going a bit more democractic, and maybe what you were talking about with showing availability, if people buy different flights from one another (e.g. coming from diverse origins, or differing availabilities or price sensitivities), having an easy way to see when each collaborator/co-traveler will land in the given destination would be very useful/cool.

My 2 cents:

It’s really hard to get consumers to switch behaviors for something they already can do through other means. Perhaps this is more efficient in some respect, but only if you ignore the inefficiency of changing your ways to learn a new tool, and further separate it from your existing communications medium (ie text messaging or whatever). I don’t feel like the value proposition is super high here.

In general people only tend to use 7 apps, and to create something for a rare activity will be very hard to keep in mind when you go to do it. So capturing the moment when people need to do it with when they find out about you is difficult to time… and that’s if you can convince them to try something new at all.

If you’re going consumer specifically for trip planning, I’d focus more on specific pain points versus “nice to haves”. It’s not clear from the website that pain points are considered. It also feels very structured, eg that you know how long you’d stop at a given place. In practice I don’t think many people operate that way, especially for a vacation unless they have reservations.

I’d suggest finding a niche with clear pain points that this solves, and then focus on that demographic. That may likely not include consumers.

Good luck, it’s really hard to make something new, put yourself out there, and know whether to stick with it or not. I’ve been down this road before. If you don’t try, it really won’t work!

I definitely agree that it is difficult to make users switch if there isn't enough of a value add. I was hoping for features like the suggestions and voting to give enough of a reason to switch, but admit that it might not be enough.

I really appreciate your comment about finding a niche and fixing pain points there. Certainly a less clear path, but more fruitful too as you mentioned.

Good points, thank you for taking the time to put this together!

I think I mostly agree with you, but I definitely have a set of apps that I install for only trips.

I had a trip back in November with 6 people in total, and plenty of sub-groups going off to do stuff, along with full-group reservations with fixed times. It would have been helpful to have something like this instead of having to search a text thread repeatedly to work out when dinner reservations are and on which days.

One specific idea - There's apps like this where if I could pay a sort of "rental" fee to create a calendar for one event instead of a full time subscription, that would be great. I don't do big group trips that need something like this all the time, but I'd maybe pay $10 or such for access for 2 months for 4-8 people.

One really important feature for me would be some good time-zone support as well, both for trips that may span different time zones, and for converting from local to remote trip times.

Why not just use google calendar? You can invite people to events, so it doesn’t need to be a shared calendar.

Mostly because I dislike and prefer not to use Google. It's also just nice to not co-mingle accounts in that way for something this specific. I have an app I use exclusively for holding my flight information for any flights I take. I don't use it a lot, but it's nice to know that I have one single app to look in for flight info. If I'd unified all my eventing around Google Cal or such, then yea, I could probably just use that, but I didn't, so having a few purpose-built apps is nice.

Just use your favorite online spreadsheet - for group trips with more than about 3 people, I've been using Google Sheets for trip planning for years. It's easy, effective, and free.

Fair, but A. what's a good non-Google or MSFT spreadsheet option, and B. that generally feels like worse UX than something like this.

This feels like a different flavor of "Why would anyone use Slack/Discord when you could just use IRC." You're not wrong, but there's something nice about purpose-built apps that have tools meant to solve specific problems instead of using a more generic tool to try to solve multiple specific problems. It's not as if I don't have other ways to solve these problems but having one nice neat tool that does a thing is useful.

A good example is an app I just re-installed for a trip - Splitwise. It's nice for splitting bills for various things among sub-sets of people on a trip together. It could absolutely be handled by a spreadsheet, but then someone would have to make that spreadsheet, and make sure it did the math right and had enough rows, and handled odd scenarios like non-even bills.

This looks like a wonderful tool, but I would be hesitant to use it solely because I'm sure Calendly's IP lawyers will try to shut you down for the name. (It's similar enough that I mistook the HN post for Calendly several times.)

+1 as a heavy Calendly user (with plenty of friends who also use Calendly), I initially mistook this for a post promoting Calendly.

I think they’re unlikely to have grounds. Calendar is a standard dictionary word and so they can hardly claim ownership of it or any misspellings of it like calenday

I'm curious what benefits you see something like this offering over a more "full-fledged" collaborative trip-planning solution like https://wanderlog.com/? The benefits of a full-featured travel-planner outweigh a calendar, especially when it does things like automatically calculate the driving time between stops. Other travel partners can "like" things, create new "lists" for whatever ("possible hotels", "restaurants", "attractions", etc.) and then drag them down to specific days. And you can "share a link" to the trip for others to just view, or invite others to collaborate...

I am still trying to figure out the exact use cases for this project so it is a bit generic, but the features on Wanderlog look quite fleshed out! I have not used it myself, but it looks like it does not have the calendar view which I personally find helpful. I think that being able to use items from other places is really helpful though.

Congrats on the launch. My company tried to tackle collaborative trip planning too by doing a shared itinerary (https://www.lunamoons.com). We went as far as collaborative booking where people could split the charge at time of reservation. It's a tricky space but would be happy chat about lessons learned in the monetization space if you're interested. Email is in profile, shoot me a note if you want to connect.

I am interesting to hear more! I wasn't able to find your email address in your profile, but feel free to send me an email.

Thank you for building this. I have been meaning to, for a few years.

I would suggest that, like when2meet, this should support coordination without every person having signed up. Perhaps require 1 person to have an account to host a day's coordination, but allow coordinators lower friction to use that day without signup. Allow account signup to be a convenient upgrade, rather than a minimum required. I support I wish there were view-urls and edit-urls.

I appreciate that you don't hint at marketing emails permission, nor have early signs of turning this into a business like ToS or Privacy Policy. It would however be comforting, clarifying, to share about the person or entity developing and hosting this.

That sounds pretty neat. I am thinking maybe anonymous accounts that can then be upgraded to a proper account. And there are actually public view URLs you can set up! They can be enabled in the Share menu.

And yes, it is in a pretty early stage right now, but I should probably add ToS and a privacy policy to cover my bases.

Nice! Using it now for a trip I'm leaving on in a few hours. :D

It would be nice to share a link that folks can suggest, without signing up. Kinda hard to get a bunch of people to make accounts on something last minute, and I'd be okay being the one who slots suggestions into times and does general management.

EDIT: Adding events is a bit painful. I've been conditioned to click on a calendar where I want the event, then fill in details. Running through every field of a date time in order (day, hour, am/pm, etc) for start and end is a lot of friction.

Thank you! This is really nice to hear! And good idea as well, I will look into adding an open suggestion mode.

I should surface this better, but you can click and drag on the calendar or drag the event button to the calendar to quick add!

Oh wow, I just tried Google Calendar, and that's exactly how you do it there also. Looks like I missed the memo on the standard way to interact with calendar apps. I mean, if Google has never communicated that to me, should you be required to? Tough call...

EDIT: Fastmail too. lol.

I would definitely use this, but Google Cal has most of these features, except the voting part. I can already collaborate on a shared cal with my friends or colleagues that sync directly to my devices (e.g. details, times, links, tickets, locations, etc.). What differentiates you from existing calendar apps that would pull users away from the Google/Apple ecosystem?

I also use Google Calendar, but in my experience sync between calendars across users is slow unless you send out invites for each event (instead of sharing a calendar). Calenday is supposed to be a real-time solution (updates happen near-instantly). It also allows you to add the plan to external calendar apps, but with a delay (imposed by the external service).

I hope for Calenday to implement features specifically for trip planning (although I am also trying to find other applications). Ideas I were considering are adding location-aware functionality like figuring out travel time and such.

Great idea. I am finding it difficult to use however. I filed one bug, and it seems that there may be a few more. Maybe there is too much load on the service, but it seems that some of the basic functions are functioning as planned. I look forward to seeing if it is just in passing, because the idea is super!

This looks great! I may try this out for a summer trip. We plan trips amongst 3-4 of us. We've used Notion before, but my wife and friend couldn't understand it. We've used a Google spreadsheet and that works OK (using travel planner template). I used a Google doc this time and it's honestly better than the other two, although in Notion I _did_ like the ability to calculate trip cost and budget using tables + calculations.

Fantastic idea and looks great.

I can see this going to another level if it had...

1) list of suggested travel hotspots to drag and drop 2) provided travel time information between activities 3) show the activites on a map so traveller can visualise and re organise based on location.

Those are really neat ideas! A prototype I had built at first had a map, but I didn't go with it because the cost to for location data searches and map renders was prohibitively expensive (I was considering Mapbox and their API got pretty pricey, Google's isn't much better and the remaining ones had licensing issues).

This came just in time. So far I'm super happy with it.

One feature I think would be cool to have would be a check in/check out time for the first and last day. Other than that I really like it and will be super useful.

Good luck!

Cool, wanted to build similar a few years ago. But didn't get past prototype phase because I was basically re-implementing google calendar + one or two small features that I only needed once per year.

One feature I really wanted (which I do using google cal with colors, though a bit clunkily) is to provide multiple complete itinerary options, usually it's due to different flights, which slightly shifts everything. It's nice to A/B compare visually, you can much more quickly see which plan is preferred.

good work!

Slightly related, but I remember seeing in the past an app/startup that offered a tool to manage the entire companies' calendar, where it tried to optimize everyone's agenda by rescheduling as many meetings as possible close to each other, so everyone would have a lot of continuous free time to focus on more demanding tasks.

But I can't find it again no matter how hard I look! Has anyone here seen anything like this? I hope they are still around :(

There are so so many calendar scheduling optimization apps these days.

Motion and Calendly are the ones I hear about most.

Thanks! Motion seems to be exactly what I was looking for.

https://www.getclockwise.com/ ? That's what our team is using for this problem and it seems to work relatively well

Honestly, the best I've found for planning trips is creating a custom google maps with all your personal points of interests along with notes, etc.

Then planning becomes trivial - hey let's hit up spots a, b, and c.

Everyone knows what those are, where they are, notes on them, and everyone is sure they are going to the same address.

This app is cool but I imagine it appeals to a certain kind of traveler more than broadly appealing to anyone taking a trip.

My two cents.

I am a professor. What I want is for students to quickly and efficiently book 15 meeting slots with me during pre-defined times and they should appear in my calender.

My university uses the Office365 suite, and I don't think the above is possible. Either I share my entire Busy/Free calender with them, and specify acceptable times in some other way. Or do a back and forth with them via email.

Calendly does exactly that.

Wow I was about to start developing something similar for my own needs. I’ll give this a try instead!

I like it!

However, I would like an interface a more long term and with fewer details.

Like I am planning the next summer with my SO, and I would like to know which day each of us is in which continent. So the interface should show me days, not hours.

I am not sure I was able to explain

Sounds like there should also be a fuzzy "sometime in late August"-type scheduling.

A way to pencil in events and sketch out a vacation.

I like the idea but the Calendly suits may have something to say about your name.

You can't trademark every conceivable variation of a common English word.

Reminded of https://www.phocuswire.com/Why-you-should-never-consider-a-t...

I wish someone recreated Google Trips. Like TripIt, but with better UX and more magic aurorecognition. Preferably self-hosted and with IMAP or JMAP support, so I can give it a folder or a tag to import trips from.

100% .. I love google trips but it can be improved by a lot. I'm afraid of giving my email access to anybody else apart from Google (only because they already have my mail). Ability to collaborate and add other events etc on google trips would be great.

Well, Google Trips doesn't exist as an app anymore. What's left is a much less functional web app and a trip section in Google Maps.

Aaah I wanted to make something like this! Good to see someone actually do it.

Looks great!

Are there any resources in particular that helped you along the way, and may be worth sharing?

(Specifically for integrating auth and calendar events)

I am building something for personal use to manage calendar, todos, and time tracking

Thank you!

I had personally not used stores a lot before, but realized how powerful they were in the project. I would try to abstract away as much as possible of the Firebase stuff and having your components talk to the store as data source. This makes it a lot easier for real-time stuff to work right (but also auth, you want to make sure to update state across the page once users log in or out).

This could be super profile for all sorts of event planning. Do you plan on expanding beyond offering this for solely for trip planning?

I kept the website purposefully vague to just mention "planning together" in general. I was thinking this might be helpful to plan corporate events, but haven't really thought of many other use cases.

Do you have any in mind? Definitely interested to hear of any ideas!

Drop an email in your HN profile, I’ll reach out shortly.

Just added it, looking forward to hearing from you!

As a trip-it free tier user, it’s not clear to me why this is a better choice. Is the value add purely the voting?

I haven't used it myself, but it looks like the goals are different. TripIt is meant for trip planning for a single person and organizing travel and stay mainly. Calenday is meant for cross-user collaboration of trips and getting consensus on activities between multiple people.

I use TripIt for multi-person travel itineraries. It does allow for sharing and multiple contributors. It is not necessarily for getting consensus on activities, but for centralizing all of your confirmed plans in one place.

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