Productivity

Stop paying for Calendly

Your availability rules, one pleasant booking page.

Calendly costs US$12–20 per person / mo, which is US$144–240 a year. You have two paths:

Option 1 · Install

Install Cal.diy for free

Cal.diy is your booking page: you send a link, the person picks a slot from your real availability, the meeting lands in your calendar, and the video link is created automatically. It is the community edition of Cal.com: the same engine, with all commercial code removed and a fully open license. The difference from Calendly: no caps (event types, calendars, integrations, everything included), your link lives on YOUR domain, and your calendar data stays on your server. It is the only tool in this library I use in production for my own business, every day.

Cal.diy vs Calendly

CriterionCal.diyCalendly
Price$0, forever$12–$20 per person per month
Event typesUnlimited (15 min, 30 min, 1 h…)One on the free plan
Your linkbook.yourdomain.com, your brandcalendly.com/you
Your calendar dataAt home (self-hosted)On their servers
IntegrationsGoogle Calendar, Meet, webhooks includedLocked behind paid plans

How to install it (even from zero)

This is the heaviest deployment in the library: a real app with its own database, hosted on a server. Exactly the kind of job I hand to Claude, and that is how mine was set up.

  1. 1

    Plan the hosting and the subdomain

    You need somewhere for the app to run around the clock: a VPS with Docker, or a platform like Railway. Plus a subdomain of your own, like book.yourdomain.com.

  2. 2

    Paste this prompt into Claude

    It will deploy the app, create the database, write the configuration, and check that your page responds:

    Deploy cal.diy (the open source appointment booking tool, repo calcom/cal.diy, official Docker image calcom/cal.diy) on my hosting, with a PostgreSQL database. Set up the necessary environment variables (NEXTAUTH_SECRET, CALENDSO_ENCRYPTION_KEY, the public URL), hook up email sending, then check that the booking page responds on my subdomain. Watch out: if my host blocks outgoing SMTP, go through the HTTP API of an email service like Resend. Explain each step to me simply, I am a beginner.
    
    Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
  3. 3

    Connect Google Calendar and set your availability

    Connect your calendar in the settings, set your open hours, and create your event types. Hard-won tip: any event marked Busy in Google blocks your slots. Switch your routine blocks to Free, or your page will always look full.

What you'll use it for

Sell your calls without back-and-forth

Consultation, audit, discovery call: you send one link, the client picks a slot, the Meet link is created and the confirmation email goes out by itself. Zero messages asking if Tuesday at 3 works.

One link per meeting type

15 minutes for a first contact, 30 for a follow-up, an hour for a consultation: each link has its own duration, its own booking questions, and its own rules.

Your calendar drives your slots

Your real meetings block slots automatically. Your routines stay visible in your calendar without blocking anything. Nobody can book during your workout.

Project health

GitHub stars
48,909
Forks
15.3k
Contributors
436
Commits
16.5k
Project age
5.5 years
License
MIT

Built with: TypeScript 95.7% · CSS 2.1% · HTML 0.7% · PLpgSQL 0.6%

Public GitHub repository data, captured on October 8, 2026.

Option 2 · Build

Build your own Calendly

Who this is for

This build is for one consultant who offers 30- and 60-minute meetings. The goal: let guests book times that are genuinely free, with no calendar ping-pong. If you need more than that, keep paying. Building it yourself is about owning a tool fitted to your exact workflow, not re-creating a venture-funded roadmap.

Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Cal.com, SavvyCal and Acuity Scheduling, since they all do the same core job.

What the prompt builds and what stays out

The prompt below builds a single version with what actually gets used. Everything else is left out on purpose.

What the prompt buildsone meeting type, weekly availability, bookings, google calendar sync, timezones, reschedule links
What stays outteam routing, payments, every calendar provider

What a minimal Calendly alternative needs

  • meeting types with duration, location, buffer, and booking horizon
  • weekly availability rules plus date-specific overrides
  • timezone-aware slot generation and guest timezone display
  • guest details, confirmation screen, reschedule, and cancel links
  • an owner dashboard with upcoming bookings

Data model

MeetingType, AvailabilityRule, CalendarConnection, Booking

Integrations

Google Calendar OAuth, transactional email

Capability context

Astro, HTMX, D1

The guardrail

Prevent double booking with one last availability check inside the booking transaction.

Deliberate non-goals

Leave out teams, round-robin routing, payments, and multiple calendar providers in v1.

The complete build prompt

Pick your stack, copy the prompt and hand it to your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex…).

You are building a production-ready software product named “Slot”, a deliberately focused alternative to Calendly. Build a complete, usable vertical slice — not a landing page, static mockup, or loose collection of components.

WORKING AGREEMENT
Before you write any implementation code, put together a short technical plan naming the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, key state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. When something conflicts, side with the narrow audience and the non-goals below. Choose a small, readable architecture over speculative abstraction, but never skip persistence, validation, error handling, or tests.

PRODUCT BRIEF
Primary user: one consultant who offers 30- and 60-minute meetings.
Primary outcome: let guests book genuinely available times without calendar ping-pong.
Product principle: optimize for the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Calendly. A first-time user should know what to do from the interface alone, with no tour or documentation.

END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS
Implement every one of these flows through the real interface and the persistent data layer:
1. The owner connects a calendar, creates a 30-minute meeting type, sets weekday availability and buffers, then publishes a booking link.
2. A guest opens the link from another timezone, picks a genuinely free slot, enters contact details, and gets a confirmation with calendar details.
3. The guest uses a signed link to reschedule or cancel; the old event is updated and both parties get the correct notification.

SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Build these as coherent, responsive views. Each screen must define its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state.
1. Owner setup: calendar connection status, default timezone, weekly availability, date overrides, and a test-availability action.
2. Meeting type editor: title, description, duration, location instructions, buffers, minimum notice, booking horizon, and active state.
3. Public booking flow: meeting summary, timezone selector, date strip, available times, guest form, review step, and confirmation.
4. Bookings dashboard: upcoming and past tabs, guest and meeting filters, status, local time, and cancel or reschedule actions.

CORE CAPABILITIES
1. meeting types with duration, location, buffer, and booking horizon
2. weekly availability rules plus date-specific overrides
3. timezone-aware slot generation and guest timezone display
4. guest details, confirmation screen, reschedule, and cancel links
5. an owner dashboard with upcoming bookings

DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES
Treat these as product requirements enforced on the server, not as interface suggestions:
1. Generate slots from the owner's availability, then subtract busy calendar intervals, buffers, existing bookings, minimum notice, and the booking horizon.
2. Store timestamps in UTC while keeping both parties’ named timezones; show a timezone label beside every appointment time displayed.
3. Place a short hold on the chosen slot and run a final conflict check in the same transaction that creates the booking.
4. Use random, expiring, revocable tokens for guest management links and never expose calendar provider tokens to the browser.

DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE
Design a small relational schema centered on MeetingType, AvailabilityRule, CalendarConnection, Booking. Before implementing it, document:
1. The purpose of each table, its primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes.
2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, the indexes the named screens need, and transaction boundaries for changes that touch several records.
3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who can trigger each one, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and which audit history must stay immutable.
4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files.
5. The idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where it applies.
Use migrations instead of ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and keep the named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, a disabled button, or a client-side check to protect a business invariant.

USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS
Implement only the roles the stated audience needs. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not just by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide a clear signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed separate users whenever several roles are needed so permissions can be shown and tested.

INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION
The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and trustworthy rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and a consistent place for primary actions. Start from server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must stay understandable if enhancement fails.

Start from server-rendered Astro pages and plain HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must stay understandable if either enhancement layer fails.

Design mobile layouts on purpose instead of just stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to signal state. Destructive actions need a clear scope and a confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent.

Add a footer to every page with the text “Created by aurelioagency.com”, where “aurelioagency.com” is an embedded link to https://www.aurelioagency.com that opens in a new tab. Keep it visible and do not remove it.

TECHNICAL DIRECTION
Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them.

Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules, not in route handlers or UI components. Put persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer plain HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when a failure can be reconciled clearly.

The product brief currently lists Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter suited to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface.

Integrate with Google Calendar OAuth and transactional email. For every integration:
- List the required environment variables in an .env.example with no real secrets.
- Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path.
- Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported.
- Keep credentials on the server, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs.
- Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for every side effect that can be repeated.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Prevent double booking with one last availability check inside the booking transaction.
Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any markup you intentionally accept, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect only the personal data the named workflow needs. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces of this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections.

ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS
Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most suitable level:
1. Two guests going for the same slot at the same time end up with exactly one confirmed booking and one helpful slot-unavailable response.
2. A daylight-saving boundary still produces the expected local availability and a calendar event at the right time.
3. Canceling a booking frees the slot, updates the connected calendar, records the reason, and sends one notification to each party.

TESTING
Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and for each external adapter's success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one on a small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run with one documented command.

OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY
Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs, but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable both in the interface and in the logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; never swallow errors silently. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path suited to the stack.

DELIVERABLES
Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a short README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should cover the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state that matters for the product.

DEFINITION OF DONE
The app is done when a new developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey with real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, no core screen is left as a placeholder, and the “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer credit is visible on every page.

NON-GOALS
Leave out teams, round-robin routing, payments, and multiple calendar providers in v1.

The app you build with this prompt carries a “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer.

Build just one piece

Short prompts that solve the hardest part without building everything.

The slot generator is just interval subtractionAvailability minus busy minus buffers, sliced into slots — across DST.
Build the slot-generation engine for a booking page. This is interval arithmetic, not calendar magic.

Inputs: weekly availability rules in the owner's timezone (say Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00), date-specific overrides, busy intervals from a calendar feed, existing bookings, a per-meeting buffer before and after, minimum notice, and a booking horizon. Output: bookable start times for a requested day, shown in the guest's timezone.

Do the math in UTC: expand the rules into concrete intervals for the date range, subtract busy intervals padded by buffers, clip to the notice-and-horizon window, then slice whatever is left into duration-sized start times on a sensible grid.

The traps: a weekly rule crossing a DST transition (9:30 may not exist that day, or may exist twice), rules that span midnight, an override that removes a whole day, and busy events that only partly overlap a slot.

Done when: the same availability produces correct local slots on both sides of a DST switch, buffers provably prevent back-to-back bookings, and no generated slot violates minimum notice at generation time.
Two guests, one slot, exactly one winnerA hold, a transaction, and a uniqueness constraint as the last line of defense.
Build the booking-confirmation path that makes double booking impossible, not just unlikely.

The slot list a guest sees is out of date the moment it renders. So when a guest picks a slot, place a short hold — a row with a five-minute expiry — so filling in the contact form is not a race. When they submit, run the final availability check and the booking insert in the same transaction: re-verify the slot against availability rules, existing bookings, and other holds, and back it all with a database uniqueness constraint on meeting type plus start time as the last line of defense.

The loser of the race gets a specific, helpful response: this exact slot was just taken, here are the nearest alternatives. Not a generic error page. Expired holds release themselves by checking expiry at read time, no cleanup cron heroics needed.

Done when: hammering one slot with concurrent submissions yields exactly one confirmed booking, every loser gets the slot-taken response with alternatives, and abandoned holds free their slot within the hold lifetime.
Reschedule links that work without an accountSigned, expiring, revocable tokens instead of guest logins.
Build reschedule and cancel links for booking confirmation emails — the kind that just work, no account needed.

Each booking gets management tokens: long random strings, stored hashed, each scoped to one booking and one action. Embed them as URLs in the confirmation email. The reschedule page shows the current details plus fresh availability; cancel asks for an optional reason.

The lifecycle rules are the interesting part: tokens expire once the meeting ends, cancelling revokes the reschedule token, and rescheduling issues fresh tokens while killing the old ones — a link in an outdated email must not be able to change the new time. Log every use. Rate-limit token guessing, and return the identical invalid-or-expired page for wrong, expired, and revoked tokens so an attacker learns nothing about which bookings exist.

No login, no session, no account creation. The token is the entire authorization.

Done when: a forwarded confirmation email can reschedule exactly that one booking, all links stop working the moment the booking is cancelled or in the past, and invalid tokens reveal nothing.
The .ics file every calendar app agrees onCRLF endings, 75-octet folding, and a UID that survives rescheduling.
Build the .ics attachment for booking confirmations so that Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook all read it the same way.

Generate a VCALENDAR containing one VEVENT: UID, DTSTAMP, DTSTART, DTEND, SUMMARY, DESCRIPTION, LOCATION, ORGANIZER, and ATTENDEE. The format is pettier than it looks: lines end with CRLF, any line over 75 octets must fold with a continuation space (count octets, not characters — emoji in a meeting title will give you away), and commas, semicolons, and newlines inside text fields need escaping.

Times: either emit UTC with a Z suffix or include a proper VTIMEZONE block with TZID references. Do not emit floating local times and hope for the best.

Keep the UID stable per booking, so a reschedule sends the same UID with an incremented SEQUENCE and updates the existing event instead of creating a duplicate. Cancellation sends METHOD:CANCEL with STATUS:CANCELLED.

Done when: the file imports cleanly into all three major clients at the correct local time, a reschedule updates the original event in place, and a 200-character description with emoji survives line folding intact.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Calendly cost if I keep subscribing?

Calendly costs $12–$20 per person per month on its public paid plans, which is $144–$240 per year for each person on your team. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus almost-free hosting.

What stack should I use to build a Calendly alternative?

The build prompt on this page comes in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, HTMX, D1. Choose the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.

What features does a minimal Calendly replacement need?

A useful v1 needs: meeting types with duration, location, buffer, and booking horizon; weekly availability rules plus date-specific overrides; timezone-aware slot generation and guest timezone display; guest details, confirmation screen, reschedule, and cancel links; an owner dashboard with upcoming bookings. Everything else is scope creep until you truly miss it.

What should I deliberately not build?

Leave out teams, round-robin routing, payments, and multiple calendar providers in v1.

Does this build also replace Cal.com, SavvyCal and Acuity Scheduling?

Yes. Calendly, Cal.com, SavvyCal and Acuity Scheduling all do the same core job — let guests book genuinely available times without calendar ping-pong. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever one you pay for today.

Is Cal.diy really free?

Yes. Cal.diy is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Calendly, on the other hand, costs €12 a month.

Do I need to code to install Cal.diy?

No. The level is advanced and the install takes about 45 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.

How is it different from Calendly?

Cal.diy does most of what Calendly does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point-by-point comparison is on the page.

Do I own my data?

Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

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No time to do it?

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If you'd rather have someone install it, connect it to your tools and keep it running, that is exactly what we do at Aurelio.

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