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Cal.com Platform is the fastest and easiest way to build scheduling into your app. Free yourself from the hassles of timezones, calendar and conferencing APIs, and scheduling logic — leverage Cal.com's robust scheduling technology to build your next product.
Hey there 👋🐱
it's Peer, cofounder of Cal.com.
today we are launching Cal.com 4.0 which is our largest release ever. Cal.com is going from a single product to a multi-product with the launch of Cal.com Platform, a headless scheduling API powered by Cal Atoms, a set of plug & play react components. ⚛️
story time 👇
when my YC company shutdown during covid i needed a job. And because i suck at interviews i did what i can do best: i started building. i saw a lot of other founders shutting down their business too, so i built a marketplace to hire ex-yc founders as contractors.
you might be surprised, but we used calendly to facilitate the meeting and asked for their link during the onboarding.
and to be frank, it sucked. its simply not what its built for.
i couldnt manage users, people didnt had an account or typos in their links, they forgot to upgrade and most importantly: i could not customise the experience. it was fully branded, felt foreign and would not work at scale with so many issues.
i needed something i could be in charge of. so i googled "calendly open source" and found 0 results. just a couple hackernews and reddit posts asking for the same damn thing.
~~two days later~~ (*imagine the french spongebob narrator voice*) i started hacking on a landing page and together with @baileypumfleet, calendso was born.
we launched and, well, the rest you've probably seen here on product hunt.
anyway, we took a bit of a detour from building the "developer focussed headless scheduling infrastructure" and started out building a consumer facing scheduling tool instead after buying the cal.com domain.
why? well – we wanted to build something that would delight people first. the most pixel-perfect, fast, secure (SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA), safe and accessible (open source) product for everyone.
if you look into the market of developer tools, a lot of these "scheduling apis" have never been touched by a consumer. it's a group of developers thinking about "hmmm what do i think other developers need" and not "what is the best for the actual host and guest"
you get scheduling apis that are outdated or just "a part of a broader offering of APIs" like Nylas, that dont get the love that they deserve.
scheduling is hard. timezones suck, calendar apis are older than your grand dad (seriously) but after facilitating multiple millions of bookings with our consumer facing product we are now going back to our roots: Scheduling Infrastructure for absolutely everyone.
we are dog-fooding our own apis, using our own components, so you can be sure what you are using for your next big idea has been battle tested by millions of people and designed by a team that really really cares about calendar scheduling.
sometimes all you have to do is go full circle and start at the beginning. today we are launching cal.com 4.0 but we are just getting started!
Peer
p.s. huge shoutout to everyone who has been supporting us. it is truly inspiring to be working with such an awesome community and go from a small side project on github to an organization that eventually connects 1 billion people. 🙏
