NeetoCal, a calendly alternative, is a commodity and is priced accordingly
blog.neeto.com
blog.neeto.com
Rough reminder for Calendly (and similar) that it's a feature, not a company.
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.
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 quickly realize $4/mth is not even remotely sustainable when you add ANY kind of marketing spend (or sales/success people). Just too low. You cannot make it work. Your customer acquisition costs will cost 12-24+ months MRR, and SMB churn is brutal. typical 30%+/yr. Even at $10/mth/user its a slog. Which is why you see other calendly alternatives charging $10-30/mth/usr at min.
Good luck.
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 spend money on marketing on sales because we are earning so less. We will rely on marketing blog like this one and the word of mouth from our users.
Once we have reached a certain level and neetoCal is mentioned as a "Calendly alternative" in most discussions then the need to spend on marekting is even less.
Lasly we are ok with having a life style business. Important thing is to be alive and not die. That's why we are prioritizing being sustainable over the growth.
Straightforward and clear-eyed writing, and subtle, almost cynical positioning perfectly suited for the HN crowd. That is: "This is easy stuff to build. Price is the main differentiator in this category."
Companies aren't looking for hypergrowth until they are. And that's when prices rise.
I think it's venerable to address the elephant in the room but then, in a room full of VC-funded startups, neeto _is_ the elephant in that it's intentionally straying from the public-company-or-bust path laid out in front of most tech startups.
Add to that the non-existing costs of switching between these offerings. I was using the Calendly free tier, and when a feature I wanted was moved off the free tier, it took me all of 30 minutes to move to zcal (most time spent fixing web site, and email signatures).
Perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Maybe there's a social aspect that escapes me, but I would love to hear from someone building in this space about their motivation and long term goals.
I 100% agree that the switching cost from Calendly is pretty low. There is very little stickiness. I agree that Google/MS adding this feature to their calendar will wipe out a huge portion of the market.
If we take this analogy that Google/MS can add feature X then it would be hard to build anything new. They are gaints and they can build anything.
However being a really big company also means that they might not be able to pay attention to the requirements of individuals. They needs to be in the game where millions of folks are using it.
You can see that in google form. It's simple and it works. Still typeform, jotform and neetoForm are thriving. That's because folks want more than what google form is offering currently.
I like their messaging and I'm more inclined to use a tool ran by a team/company like these guys.
Consider me a customer... whenever I clean up the backlog
Calendly is $8/user/month for essentials tier and $12/month for professional tier
For reference
neetoCal is $2/user/month if billed annually.
The platform is made for booking but you can use it to show your availability, by allowing people to request meetings and then not accepting any of the requests.
4 dollars per month seems still pretty excessive for the very low resource intensive work of such an app.
In relation to the prices of Office365/Google Workspace, I don't think this should cost more than 1 euro/dollar per user per month.
Even if you compare it to much more resources intensive app like Disney Plus, which costs 8 euros per month, how can this cost 4?
You’re paying for the value it adds.
A Google Suite account costs 6 dollars per month, do you think this is 80% of that value?
Microsof Office 365 family includes 6 accounts 1TB of spacce, 60 minutes of free call in skype, word, excel, powerpoint, etc, and costs 10 per month.
A calendar application like this has 1/1000 the complexity and I would add 1/1000 the value. And even more, this functionality can easily be added by MS (google already did).
The price makes no sense.
I'm with you on your ask for 1 euro/dollar per user per month. And that's what is reflect in our yearly billing which is $2 per user per month.
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.
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.
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.
There's two pricing plans "free and all the features" and 4.99/"user"/month if you want to remove their logo.
That makes it read as self-congratulatory - there isn't a plan for it to be a sustainable investment, and it's not clear it's that cheap either.
Either pole of "take $10M in funding for a SaaS" and "eh we'll be free 99% and figure literally everything else, from marketing to support to sales, on on the fly" is an extreme.
To users, the funding one sounds better: at least that maximizes quality, support, and engagement with the company until right-sizing occurs. 0 reason for users to care that it'll feel like "losing" to the founders or that VCs will be disappointed.
This is the feature... the ability to create a meeting 'poll' with all the members on your team, including external people, and it automatically takes into consideration everyone's availability.
https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/223146447-Let-in...
The second feature is that I tried to reach out to the zcal support to ask if they had this feature and I could see they read my message, but I never got a response. So, having some sort of decent customer support is another crucial feature.
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 Zoom/Google/etc (but not CalDAV, somehow)
- email notifications, OTP and SSL (what is this, 2013?)
Personally, I use cal.com, which has all of that, plus is open source and self-hostable. And it interfaces with CalDAV so I'm not locked into Google Calendar.
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.
I'm personally using Cal.com, it's free and I'm very happy. I'm also very biased because we interviewed the co-founder/co-ceo [1] and Cal.com uses our platform to reward its open source contributors [2]
what I love most about Cal is how young developers from around the world learn modern tech by contributing (and getting trained by the team) [3], support is crazy good [4] and the company builds in public, even their salaries and metrics are open [5]. I cannot not be a fan honestly
[1] https://youtu.be/gymNEH-skAY
[3] https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/pulls
$29 lifetime access as long as Sumo stays in business.
These types of subscribe overlays, especially for a company blog with a product that aims to compete on features/pricing, are really unnecessary and annoying.
I prefer to have short memorable meeting links.
We tried to raise this with Calendly but they refused the request. Their answer: "Thank you for reaching out to Calendly! We've found that manual confirmation of each appointment only increases the steps it takes to schedule. Not having to confirm/deny/reschedule a booking eliminates the email ping pong of scheduling!"
Which totally misses the point. My calendar is not always perfect, sometimes I miss travel times, sometimes I forgot to enter things. I want to confirm my meetings.
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 apps seem to have such a practical dependency on Google, if one wants to facilitate syncing with arbitrary external calendars. I get that Calendly has tons of integrations, and Neeto has a useful selection, too. But say I want to sync with Fastmail, which does not have a specific integration with Calendly or Neeeto (but which does support CalDAV/IMAP). The answer is to to mutually sync through a Google Calendar. (I guess a generic "data workflow integrator"--Zapier, IFTTT, or custom code for APIs--might solve this, too, but only at the cost of some additional party and some additional complexity for a glue layer to set up and upon which to rely.)
- I love having a slick scheduling web page interface as a service. Cool. But why no "generic" sync (CalDAV/IMAP or something better I may not know about)? (It seems weird to not have a more direct-line scheduling approach--is it just me?)
- For example, I'd like to have no Google dependency, but use Calendly (or, Neeto, or another scheduling service). But even when I don't plan/need/want/intend to use Google, much less for scheduling, Google still finds its way into being the most convenient dependency! Wow!
This wasn't meant to be a rant, so, apologies if it reads that way. I get that building a SaaS, the first integrations will be the ones that >90% of the target probably uses. It's just slightly boggling to me, though, that there seems to be literally no open-tech solution in place. Since even the 500 lb gorillas seem to not have it, it's not just a matter of scale/time. Maybe just literally not enough people would use it, period, I guess. Or does one of the many competitors do this?
So-- what's going on? Why's calendar syncing kinda convoluted? (Some reading online tells a similar story for a big company's mail product requiring specific sync tools as of late; so I think the issue is not limited to purely-scheduling apps or smaller companies.)
Does this plight register with others? To me, if the product/service truly is a commodity, then that might imply having a corresponding "common" open/standard tech-integration component--no? I suspect something about security, or maybe lock-in, or market size, or maybe ruthless focus on schedule-making (new bookings on top of existing ones) over schedule-syncing, but I don't know enough about it. I would think this might be an area where one of the competitors might be able to stand out, for a niche within the niche.
I'd be happy to be schooled on this, if anyone's willing.
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.
The backend is based on API. We have not yet exposed it. We'll do that very shortly.