On this day, 5 months after the first initial launch on Product Hunt, Calendso is rebranding to Cal.com and launches the first v.1.0 release candidate.
The last 5 months have been an incredible journey, fueled by the massive growth of our community, product, and company. What started out as a simple side project, an open source alternative to Calendly, has now grown to become the category leader of Open Scheduling Infrastructure.
Today, Cal.com is serving thousands of customers and hundreds of companies. Everything from solo-entrepreneurs, startups, VCs, government entities, telemedicine, and enterprise companies have either launched a product on top of Cal.com or are in the middle of implementing it.
The first company to launch a product using our open core was On Deck, which leveraged Cal.com to build a feedback hub inside of their fellowship community portal. It offers any fellow the ability to book meetings with internal and external experts for fundraising support, product feedback, or general help.
Furthermore, the core team has grown from the two of us, Peer and Bailey to 12 talented folks working together on decentralizing communications. The vast majority of the team members have previously contributed to the open core which made joining the team a fairly easy decision for them.
Changing the name was not the only thing that has happened since the Product Hunt launch.
We’ve worked with Ciarán Hanrahan on a complete redesign of our core product and marketing pages and with Typography Artist Mark Davis on Cal Sans, our very own open-sourced font for our brand and headlines.
For the entire team, today is a big day. Renaming Calendso to Cal.com and launching the first release candidate as v.1.0 is likely one of the biggest milestones for us in 2021.
Here’s what's new since Product Hunt:
Cal.com
Zoom
Google Meet
Accept payments with Stripe
New Free Hosted Plan
Redesigned Dashboard
New Cal Video powered by Daily.co
New Cal Sans Typography (open source)
New API Docs
New Apple Calendar Integration
New Round-Robin
New Group Scheduling
Claim Premium Username for lifetime
The story behind Cal.com
Ever since starting Calendso, we’ve focussed on making scheduling more open, accessible and efficient. After several months of brand exercises, research and negotiations with domain owners, we were lucky to come to terms with the previous owners of Cal.com.
Going from calendso.com/peer (8 letters) down to cal.com/peer (3 letters) saves you 62.5% of typing:
Twenty years after the big bang of the internet it's basically impossible to find three-letter domains for sale, let alone one that can fit your product so perfectly like Cal.com for Calendars.
It’s a blessing to be able to call this domain our new home on the web, even though the chances were slim:
Brand & Design Guidelines
We’ve decided to go for a classy, timeless, and trustworthy design system with strong contrasts, minuscule border radiuses, and a black & white color theme.
As a brand and company, our core philosophy is to be open, transparent, and adaptable for any other external brand. As the only scheduling product out there offering a true open source white-label solution we believe that black & white are the only colors that work perfectly with any other primary or accent color.
Our new typography: Cal Sans is designed to reflect exactly that. The rounded e, a and o are representing the perfeclty shaped watch face of a clock, which everyone of us is either having on their wrist or on the wall.
True to the nature of open source, we've opened up our Cal UI design documentation on design.cal.com and we're looking to fully open-source both Cal Sans and our UI components in the next weeks to come. Accessible and free for anyone to use.
New: Free Plan
But that's not everything. To celebrate the first release candidate with you, the community, we're also introducing a free plan for the very first time. During the alpha, we've only offered a $12/month/user plan, which is now called pro. The newly added free plan will include one event type and can be upgraded at any time in the dashboard.
Claim a Premium Username
Also new: with Cal.com as our new domain, we've decided to reserve premium usernames (less than 4 or a hand-picked selection of very common first names) to prevent username squatters from stealing your account name.
We know cal.com/firstname is a precious piece of internet real-estate so we made sure you can only claim a username by either joining the waitlist, or with a one-time-purchase of a lifetime membership for $499 (essentially free after 3 ½ years: $12 _ 12 _ 3 ½ = $504).
We're only reserving the usernames for the next 14 days. Afterwards, every premium username can be either registered $29/month on a first-come-first-serve basis.
50 people on the waitlist will be chosen at random and win a lifetime membership and premium username. Share your referral link and tell your friends to receive more entries in the waitlist.
Purchasing or winning the lifetime membership will also give you early access to any upcoming products in the Cal Suite, exclusive access to members only Slack channels, Cal Merch and overall a badge of honor for just being a really cool person.
To get started, go to Cal.com and claim your firstname.
What's Next
v.1.1 i18n: translations, currencies, localised date formats
Ending Note
With almost 2,100+ upvotes on Product Hunt and 6,200+ stars on GitHub, Cal.com represents the highly engaged and enthusiastic developer community which was desperately searching and waiting for a scheduling product like Cal.
It’s amazing to see the love and warm feedback in our 800+ person strong Slack on a day-to-day basis. You’re the reason we’re working on this, 7 days a week.
Thank you.
Peer & Bailey, and the Cal.com Team
P.S.: Another shout-out to the team and investors who recently joined Cal.com, Inc. for supporting us. We’re hiring.
