TidyCal Review: Best Calendly Alternative for $29?

What Is TidyCal and Why Does It Exist?

TidyCal is one of AppSumo's in-house "Originals" — tools built by the AppSumo team and sold as lifetime deals on their marketplace. It sits alongside KingSumo (giveaways) and SendFox (email marketing) as part of a growing suite designed to cover the core needs of small businesses.

At its heart, TidyCal is a Calendly replacement. You get a shareable booking link, people pick a time that works, and you're off to the races. The difference is the price: a single $29 lifetime payment versus Calendly's $10/month per seat. For a five-person team, that's $145 once compared to $600 every year.

TidyCal Pricing: One Plan, One Price

There's no decision paralysis here. TidyCal offers a single plan at $29 — period. That gets you 10 calendar connections, support for both free and paid meetings, reduced TidyCal branding, group bookings, and integrations with Zoom, Google Meet, Zapier, and a developer API. If you need accounts for multiple team members, you simply buy additional plans.

The value proposition becomes obvious when you stack it against Calendly. Even Calendly's cheapest paid tier runs $10/month per person. Scale that to a small team and you're looking at hundreds of dollars a year in perpetuity. TidyCal's one-time cost makes it a genuinely compelling alternative, especially if scheduling isn't the core of your business but still something you need to handle professionally.

Setup Process and Calendar Connections

Getting started with TidyCal is straightforward. After purchasing through AppSumo, you're redirected to TidyCal's site to create your account — no activation codes needed, just a seamless handoff between platforms.

The first step is connecting a calendar provider. You can choose from Google, Office 365, or Apple accounts. It would be nice to see standard CalDAV support for people who prefer open standards, but the big three will cover the vast majority of users. After that, you connect a video conferencing service — Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. The Zoom integration took just a few seconds with a quick two-factor authentication step.

You can also wire up payment processing right away through Stripe or PayPal, and there's even a built-in Calendly importer. If you're migrating from Calendly, you can connect your account and TidyCal will automatically pull in your existing booking types so you don't have to rebuild everything from scratch.

Creating and Customizing Booking Types

TidyCal creates a few default booking types for you out of the box, which you can immediately edit. Each booking type has its own URL, title, and availability schedule. You can set recurring weekly availability or lock a booking type to a specific date — handy for one-off events like performance reviews, parent-teacher conferences, or a single workshop day.

The specific-date feature is worth highlighting. You pick a single day, define the available hours, and the generated link only applies to that date. It's a small but thoughtful feature that saves you from creating workarounds when you need to book out a particular day for a particular purpose.

Advanced Booking Settings

Dig into the advanced settings and TidyCal reveals some surprisingly granular controls. You can define how far in advance people can book, set buffer time between meetings, and require a minimum notice period — anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. The time slot interval can differ from the actual meeting duration, giving you flexibility in how your calendar appears to invitees.

There's also a maximum bookings cap so you can limit yourself to, say, two meetings per day to avoid back-to-back fatigue. Meeting locations can be set to video conference, phone, a physical address, or left open for follow-up.

Group bookings let multiple people reserve the same time slot, which is great for webinars, yoga classes, or lectures. You can set a seat limit and display remaining availability. Paid bookings are just as easy to configure — set a price and TidyCal handles the rest through your connected PayPal or Stripe account. Custom intake questions, recurring/package bookings, and configurable email reminders round out the feature set. You can even set a custom redirect URL to send people to a specific page after they book.

The Booking Experience for Your Invitees

From the invitee's perspective, the booking screen is clean and functional. Appointment details — duration, seat count, price, and recurrence — are displayed clearly on the left side. The calendar picker automatically detects the visitor's time zone and lets them browse available days and times with minimal friction.

For paid bookings, a PayPal window pops up inline to handle payment. For free bookings, the flow is even simpler: pick a day, pick a time, enter your name, and confirm. After booking, invitees get options to add the event to their calendar, book another meeting, or cancel if plans change. There's also a "view mutual availability" feature that lets the invitee connect their own calendar so both parties can see overlapping free time — a genuinely useful touch for coordinating busy schedules.

Booking types can be embedded directly on your website or shared as standalone links, and there's a booking page that displays all your public booking types in a clean grid layout.

Managing Bookings and Contacts

The "My Bookings" section gives you a straightforward view of all scheduled appointments. You can reschedule, cancel, or view details — including any answers to custom intake questions your invitees filled out during booking.

TidyCal also maintains a contacts list of everyone who's ever booked with you. You can export these contacts for use in an email marketing tool like SendFox. In fact, since both TidyCal and SendFox are AppSumo Originals, a native integration between the two feels like a natural next step — AppSumo already built this kind of connection for KingSumo.

Date Polls: Find the Best Time for Groups

Date Polls solve a common scheduling headache: figuring out when a group of people can all meet. You create a poll with a title, description, duration, and a set of proposed dates and times. Then you share the link and let participants vote on what works best for them.

Each proposed time slot has its own start and end time, so you can offer a variety of options across different days and times of day. Participants submit their name and email along with their votes, and they'll get notified when you finalize the date. It's a simple feature, but it's the kind of thing that saves a dozen back-and-forth emails when you're trying to organize a team lunch or a client meeting with multiple stakeholders.

TidyCal Branding: Does It Matter?

Like other AppSumo Originals, TidyCal includes some platform branding on your booking pages. The lifetime deal advertises "reduced branding" rather than full removal. Whether this bothers you comes down to context.

For a scheduling tool, the branding feels less intrusive than it would on, say, a marketing email. Everyone understands you're using software to manage appointments — there's no illusion of a hand-crafted experience. Email, on the other hand, carries a more personal tone, which is why branding on tools like SendFox might push you toward the paid add-on to remove it. For TidyCal, most users probably won't think twice about it.

Final Verdict: Is TidyCal Worth It?

TidyCal earns an 8.7 out of 10 — and it's the standout favorite among the AppSumo Originals lineup so far. It's genuinely hard to identify a feature you'd miss coming from a paid platform like Calendly. You get calendar connections, video conferencing integration, paid and free bookings, group events, date polls, custom fields, recurring packages, and a Calendly importer — all for a one-time $29 payment.

If you're a freelancer, consultant, or small business owner who needs professional scheduling without an ongoing subscription, TidyCal is close to a no-brainer. Pair it with the other AppSumo Originals — KingSumo for giveaways and SendFox for email — and you can cover a surprising amount of your business tooling with three lifetime deals.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.