I tried using https://cal.com for a bit but ended up just switching over to 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
There HAS to be a name for this phenomenon.
These are great products. But then they start adding feature over feature that add no or just little value while making the entire experience worse.
What is this? VC money feature creep?
I needed a scheduling solution that let me tweak a bunch of knobs regarding when I was available, for what, how much that cost, how that payment could be processed, my team, different locations, how full to book me, which notifications to send to whom and when, which data I needed to gather for each type of appointment or package of appointments, and, and, and, and before you know it I've given the developer 5 years worth of feature requests, and I'm just one of their customers.
I totally get the point that’s being made, but to be able to have a product which is good enough to sell, we have to be able to cater to the hundreds of features that customers tell us we need.
Everything we build is entirely community and customer demand driven, so effectively all of these features are in place to support every different use case that customers require as part of their scheduling needs.
We are looking at ways to make the app simpler, with the advanced options still readily available for those who need it. For example, some of our advanced features are hidden as apps which you install to be able to see their options. However if anyone here has further ideas, feel free to create a ticket on GitHub. We’d love your input!
Where and how do you manage your community?
Though I'm not sure that calling it the DMTADTM phenomenon would quite catch on.
also see: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Not fan of the name though.
Like how if an ER was run the way software is maintained, then, on a slow day, the doctor would order all the nurses to go in to the waiting room and bust everyone's knee caps.
Imagine if you did one thing really well (like booking meetings). It would take Microsoft or google a year to copy the functionality into their own apps.
No one cares when money is cheap, but in a recession the first thing cut is going to be some single use SaaS app. For software that was sold with a license key it obviously isn’t as much of an issue, but the recurring revenue makes you beholden to continuously adding new features.
Fact: Project owners decide features and project managers assign them to developers.
They can’t even code!
Required reading
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?
“… permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar”
Granting that takes a lot of trust in Zcal.
take your hourly rate, plus the other person's hourly rate, let's say $100 each, multiplied by 10 minutes spent on emailing back and forth that were avoided, and out pops $33.33.
Calendly is only $12/month for their professional plan which saves you money if you even schedule only one meeting a month with it.
I'm against any and all per-user fees because it's death by a thousand cuts and I refuse to allow that to happen. I will take the time to setup an open-source thing that does the same thing, even if the hourly rate of my setup ends up costing like five years of service JUST BECAUSE I'm that against per-user fees.
But you're not paying for storage costs, you're paying for the salaries of everyone involved with making the product, as well as the hosting costs, and some amount of profit to do with as they please.
Which is fairly pretty central to how capitalism works!
My earlier point is that they have enterprise plans, for those that don't want to pay per-user fees, but, uh, they're enterprise priced.
* This hour rate is absurdly high for huge part of the world. Try $20.
* This argument is used by every SaaS ever. If you want to use everything in that model, you would need 20 of them. At least.
* Slack is $7 a month. Office package starts at $6. Github starts at $4. These are huge tools that make work possible. Small random tool priced at the same level is expensive.
2) Yes? I don't know about 20, but
1 project mgmt: Trello/Monday/Clickup/etc 2 if programming, github/gitlab/etc 3 an Office suite (MS or Google Docs), 4 Email (gmail/office365) 5 comms (Slack) 6 web hosting (squarespace/wix/godaddy/roll-your-own on AWS/GCP/Azure) 7 scheduling cal.com/calendly 8 healthcare 9 payroll (gusto) 10 bookkeeping (pilot.com or quickbooks) 11 401k
Those are just the ones off the top of my head. I'm genuinely curious to hear what I've missed!
That's besides the point though. Tools do a relatively specific thing. You can't use Slack to pay employees instead of Gusto, Slack doesn't even have a way to transfer money! So you need a tool that does the job that you need done. If it takes 20, it takes 20.
Just because a particular SaaS company uses that argument doesn't mean you have to buy their service. If you can do without it, then don't buy it!
3) Yes but that small random tool does a very specific job. I don't care if hammers are free and screwdrivers are expensive, if I need a screwdriver, I need a screwdriver and I'll pay whatever it costs. (fine, sure there's some point at which point you can reengineer something to use a hammer if a screwdriver's that expensive, but if you're smart enough to make that point you're smart enough to get my point)
Anyway, my real question is what is it about making tools that makes people so cheap? And not just software either, Harbor Freight has been making everything out of Chinesium which is ludicrously cheap, to Craftsman's detriment. If you go and see a movie you really like in a good theater, you're happy you paid for a ticket and ate the overpriced popcorn, when you could have torrented it for free at home and watched it on your phone. There's something about tools that brings out the cheapness in, at least me, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it simply because we need so many of them?
https://xkcd.com/2347/ is all too true, but then Dwarf Fortress and they became millionaires overnight! Not that I begrudge them that money, but just that like, human psychology is so interesting!
2) IDE (Jetbrains), knowledge repository (wiki,confluence, notion), on-call management (pager duty, jira SD), error monitoring (sentry) - just a few from the top of my head. AWS pricing and size of the offering is topic on its own.
3) it's not being cheap. At least not only that. Take a look at this summary [1] I stumbled upon recently. According to this calculation tools may account for almost 20% of recurring expenses in Sweden. Sweden is far from being poor. What's more important - you must pay, because otherwise you lose it (hope it never happens to my screwdrivers or popcorn). This is huge liability, that may stop your company from operating. Often really unnecessary.
If you have to view things that way, that summary is bloated. stop paying for slack, use google starter for $6/mo instead of microsoft or google standard, don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...
I'm not against paid tools in general. My company pays for many - lots of IntelliJ licenses (at least XXk eur/year), jira server (hard to summarize over the years, but probably at least couple of cars worth) and many others, but we prefer "pay once and own it" model, because we updated when we needed. Sometimes we pushed this for later and spent cash for raises and/or additional people, which were more important than minor software updates. That's why I really dislike subscription model - you don't have this choice - either you pay now or you're out. Don't like new prices? Feel free to migrate for couple of months (while still paying).
> don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...
We actually host ton of stuff on-prem. Isn't nearly as bad as people like to frame it. Of course we have some subscribtions, because it's business not crusade, but in general keeping mandatory recurring costs low, proved to be good strategy.