Peer Richelsen

Cal.com Platform โ€” Build your pixel-perfect booking experience with Atoms

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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 โ€” leverage Cal.com's robust scheduling technology to build your next product.

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Peer Richelsen
Maker
๐Ÿ“Œ
Hey there ๐Ÿ‘‹๐Ÿฑ 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. โš›๏ธ story time ๐Ÿ‘‡ 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 โ€“ 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. ๐Ÿ™
Omar McPizza ๐Ÿ•
@baileypumfleet @peer_rich this is needed you are the only ones to solve global scheduling excited to integrate into #UnInbox
Chris Gwilliams
@peer_rich so...it's not just postgres?
Penaaz Valecha
@baileypumfleet @peer_rich Super pumped for this launch! Your team has ALWAYS been crazy inspiring, and there's no two ways about it. Massive congratulations!!!
Greg Zen at StartupHeroics.com
@baileypumfleet @peer_rich Cal is infinitely better than Calendly and I have been a huge fan from the day I started using it. Kudos on the fantastic work and especially the pace at which your team and contributors have been pumping out fixes and updates. Keep it up!
Robin Choy
@peer_rich you got me with your story here! Shut up and take my money! ๐Ÿ˜ฌ What a great launch, excited for you folks!
Andreas Klinger
I know healthtech startups who built for the first months nothing else than the scheduling part of their product. It wasn't the core or the unique part of their business. But they just underestimated the effort and were like "well it's timeslots how hard can it be". They ended up with a brittle setup and lost months of product development. Excited that Cal now offers headless infra!
Peer Richelsen
@andreasklinger very common. its a slippery slope, especially as you start its easy and you run into a ton of unknown unknowns super quick -- now you have sunken cost and tech debt without having spend a single minute working on the actual business
Richard Poelderl
@andreasklinger I built a two sided marketplace in a couple of intense days with cal. Marketplaces will be so much easier to scaffold very soon.
Uzair Hayat
@andreasklinger I took this on for my own startup too, scheduling is HARD. Far too many moving parts. I shelved the feature. But now I can't wait to get to my desk and start tinkering with Cal.com again.
Steven Tey
Very excited for this launch! I've already seen a ton of Cal.com embeds โ€“ this will only take those embeds to the next level with custom styling. Congrats team!
Peer Richelsen
@steventey not only booking embeds, our vision is to offer any important component you see in app.cal.com to be modular and injectable into your project
Tangerine
@peer_rich now if only one of these components would be an entire calendar... ๐Ÿ’€ I'll show myself out
Viet Le
This is the answer to what if shadcn would have actually joined cal.com
Peer Richelsen
@viet_le dude we tried so harrdd to get him ๐Ÿ˜ž
Omar McPizza ๐Ÿ•
I've been using cal.com for a few years now, came from calendly one was like using a horse and cart - the other a futuristic flying car as a product maker, I am super excited to start nesting Cal's atoms into our services the possibilities are endless, and our users will love it p.s. I can no longer book calendly links, theres a mental block. spoke to my therapist, they tried cal, and now they suffer the same. apparently its called SuperiorCalism
Peer Richelsen
@mcpizza0 my therapist is using cal too
Shushant Lakhyani
Cal is always one of my favorites for call scheduling with potential clients. Thanks for creating this gem!
Ansub Khan
Love this launch! Great work @peer_rich and Team Cal
Peer Richelsen
@ansub thank you!! ๐Ÿฅณ
Allen John
COSS for the win! ๐Ÿฅ‡
Ankur Datta
Everytime I see cal.com, I'm like: Why does calendly even exist xD
Elliot Padfield
This is big. Atoms is one of those 'obvious' products that has been so desperately needed. Knowing that there's finally a calendar library that will get treated as a first-class citizen is refreshing. Fantastic documentation, as well. Kudos to whoever worked on that.
Yared
This is a good product. Good Luck, @peer_rich !
cal 4.0! <3 Love this to bits! Excited to try atoms!
Catalin Pit
You are all doing a great job at Cal.com! I'm a big fan of your product, and I hope you take the 1st spot today! ๐Ÿ† Congrats on the launch and good luck! ๐Ÿคž
Johannes
Super cool approach to make building on top of the open source scheduling infrastructure very easy! Will checkout in detail, Atoms is also a great name for a component library ๐Ÿ˜
Corentin from โ—ฏหšGitStart
Love it! Clean docs and awesome old windows theme. Congrats to the team ๐Ÿ”ฅ
Peer Richelsen
Oh, also try our replit example: https://go.cal.com/replit
Omar McPizza ๐Ÿ•
@peer_rich HOLY MOLY why you hiding this scared you'd give calendly a heart attack with all staff abandoning all hope?
Vasily Kolosov
It's inspiring to see how your journey from a YC shutdown led to the creation of such a powerful scheduling platform. I'm curious, what are some of the key features or improvements that users can expect from Cal.com platform compared to traditional scheduling APIs like Nylas?
Peer Richelsen
@vasily_kolosov1 couple things, unlike nylas we also handle all video conferencing apps. we have more components, easier to customise, more modern, better infrastructure (due to our consumer user base), mostly because we only do scheduling while calendar APIs are just one out of many APIs that nylas is offering
Hamza Zia
We use Cal.com to talk to every new prospect, and setup calls with all of our existing customers. Life would not be the same without Cal.com. So excited for the v4 release!!! ๐Ÿš€
Mindaugas Petrutis
Congrats on the release team. Can't wait to use it to build some automagical scheduling infra for my own product. Let's go ๐Ÿ”ฅ
Jatin Sandilya
So excited for this launch! Great work by the team shipping so many cool things! Avid user of the product and fan of the team! lets gooooooo! ๐Ÿซถ๐Ÿซก