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by leftnode 1896 days ago
Congratulations on launching. My (small) startup is a Calendly user for our sales and support staff. What would cause me to switch from Calendly to your product?

I would never want to self host this. We're a small team, and no one technical wants to manage yet another server, nor do we want the responsibility for when something screws up and a salesperson misses a demo or a support staff member isn't reminded about a training session.

The pricing isn't that competitive with Calendly ($3/user/month savings) which would translate to a savings of $108 annually for us, not enough to justify switching.

I feel pitching this as an open source alternative to Calendly is the wrong angle. The only people who care about open source are developers who are the least likely people to need scheduling software. And people who do need Calendly aren't going to be moved to switch because Calendly works well enough already.

Finally, the copy at the bottom of the page reads:

> For instance, booking a COVID vaccine shouldn't happen on a server in another country that somebody else is in control of.

Are people using Calendly to book COVID vaccines? If I used your product instead, wouldn't I still be booking a vaccine on someone else's server?

I wish any small competitor success against a large incumbent, but I would radically change my approach to compete against Calendly.

1 comments

Self Hosting always implies more work, generally its attractive to entities that have data protection requirements. Them offering a hosted alternative is a proven business model (Gitlab for example).
This. I operate in a regulated environment, self-hosting is critical unless I sign a BAA. Even then, I'm risk-averse to allowing PHI to escape the bounds of my sandbox.