I don't want Calendly mining my event data which is extremely sensitive.
From their privacy policy:
> We may disclose information to current or future affiliates or subsidiaries for research, marketing, and other purposes consistent with this Privacy Notice.
Free accounts in calendly only allow for one event type. Maybe this allows to offer more event types (e.g. different lengths) for free.
Furthermore you could self-host, if you don’t want to trust Calendly. calendars are somewhat problematic privacy wise. Especially considering if this gets extended with support for other calendar systems than Google.
When you have an open source project, you always know what we do with your data, which is very important nowadays. Also apart from that we have small feature that aim to improve user experience when creating or accepting invite. In this case we show their own events in calendar so they have an overview of what are they doing during the week.
It’s a fun project, also I open sourced the infrastructure part so you can self host too.
Thank you, very helpful answer. I was not trying to be antagonistic, I had never heard a critique of calendly and wanted to understand how an open source project would improve the situation. I agree, very important to understand how your data is used.
From their privacy policy:
> We may disclose information to current or future affiliates or subsidiaries for research, marketing, and other purposes consistent with this Privacy Notice.
https://calendly.com/privacy