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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ?
You could use cal.com (one of the competitors mentioned in the post). The use case you described would fit into their free tier.
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.
Cool, I've had "add a personal calendar appointment scheduler feature" on my backlog for months, and for some reason I just didn't want to do Calendly. Maybe it's because I'm pretty averse to overgrown SaaS?
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
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!
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...?
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.
We were on the lowest tier and recently forcibly moved to a higher one (from 5.20 EUR a month to now 7.80 EUR a month to 15.60 EUR a month starting 2024), and it looks like I have access to the feature.
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.
This is pretty but not robust. I'm speaking from personal experience because I recently built a scheduling integration for a client that is deeply in the Google Workspaces for everything club yet we still had to reach for Calendly because Google simply doesn't provide a proper API.
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.
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.
Tried few apps from this list and I'm surprised to find that at least 3 of those don't support phone only reservations... Some kind of businesses rely on phone mostly, email is almost not used ... and entering it is major inconvenience
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."
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).
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 pay 10/12 dollars per year for Bitwarden, I pay 36 dollars per month (6 accounts) for Gsuite, I pay 10 dollars per month for Skype, I pay for Netflix and Disney Plus, but you know for sure that I won't pay 1 dollar for NeetoCal. Right.
I have such a small but annoying pet peeve about Calendly. It's That if I'm trying to copy my meeting scheduler link and go to just type c ... a... l ... into my browser, my calendars will always come up first, so I have to go all the way to c ... a ... l ... e ... n ... d ... l ... before the link.
Love the logic and intent but then I see people why people are asking about these subjects on ProductHunt:
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.
Started reading then got presented with a huge popup overlay / ad telling me to subscribe to their blog. Closed the site. I did like what I started reading about not taking VC funding though - that is very refreshing.
You can use uBlock Origin to filter those out, though for a site that you'll only visit once, it probably isn't worth it.
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.
We are using Substack for our blogs. Substack is asking you to subscribe. This is not something we control. You can click on "Continue reading" without providing your email.
>What about marketing and Sales? Won't that cost a lot? Sure, that would cost a lot if you are looking for hypergrowth. Then you need to spend money on ads. We are looking for sustainable growth without spending any money on ads. It means slower growth, but it also means fewer expenses for us. This makes us more sustainable.
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.
Absolutely. We are optimizing for sustainability. The important thing is not to die. As long as we are alive and we are serving our customers well then we are in "business".
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 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.
thank you for supporting us! The CalDAV integration alone took a ton of engineering hours because every provider has implemented this protocol differently
Just an addendum, these BigBinary folks also helped build Gumroad, so you might definitely want to consider them for Ruby on Rails projects if you need consultants.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread$29 lifetime access as long as Sumo stays in business.
The backend is based on API. We have not yet exposed it. We'll do that very shortly.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/issues/9533
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.
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.
Calendly is $8/user/month for essentials tier and $12/month for professional tier
For reference
neetoCal is $2/user/month if billed annually.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.