A self-hosted Calendly alternative you own
Calendly meters you per seat, forever. The honest self-hosted alternatives — the free open-source ones first, then a paid tool you buy once — with today's prices, verified and dated.
Calendly is the default name in scheduling, and it charges like one: a per-seat monthly meter that grows with your team and never stops. If you just need people to book time with you without renting a widget forever, here is the honest self-hosted field — the free options first, because a guide that hides them is an ad.
What Calendly actually costs
Prices read on the vendors' own pages on 2026-07-22:
- Calendly — a free tier exists, but the paid Standard is $10/seat/month (read 2026-07-22). Per seat is the part that bites: a 3-person team on Standard is $30/month — $1,080 over three years, for scheduling.
- Acuity Scheduling (Squarespace) — Starter $16/month (read 2026-07-22; billed annually, higher monthly), scaling up through $20–$61 tiers. Flat-per-account rather than per-seat, but still a permanent meter.
The free self-hosted options (start here if they fit)
- Cal.com — the open-source heavyweight and the closest free Calendly replacement: polished UI, team routing, a large integration surface. The trade-off is a modern JavaScript stack — self-hosting means running a Node/Postgres deployment and tracking a fast-moving project. If you have the ops comfort, it is genuinely excellent.
- Easy!Appointments — the classic open-source PHP scheduler on ordinary LAMP hosting: services, providers, working plans. The interface and feature pace show their age, and deposit workflows are not its focus — but for simple booking on cheap hosting, it is free and solid.
If either covers your needs and your ops appetite, use it. Free-and-self-hosted beats paid-and-self-hosted when the features fit.
Where a paid, owned tool fits
Slotly is our commercial entry: a one-time $34 purchase with the full PHP source, built around one obsession Calendly-style tools mostly assume away — a scheduling engine that cannot double-book, enforced at the database level even when two people hit the same slot at the same instant, and proven by its shipped test suite. Add timezone/DST-correct slots, prep/cleanup buffers, blackout dates, group-class capacity, per-service deposits, coupons, and email reminders via one cron line — on the same boring shared-hosting PHP as Easy!Appointments. Live demo, no signup.
Honest limits, in plain text before you pay: no online card capture at booking (deposits are quoted and tracked in admin, not processed), single business per install, and it is not a multi-vendor marketplace. If you need those, Slotly is not your tool.
The three-year arithmetic
Against Calendly Standard for a 3-seat team ($30/month), Slotly's $34 one-time purchase breaks even in the first month and a half, and then the meter stops — over three years that is $1,080 rented versus $34 owned, with the client list in your own database instead of a vendor's. The rent-vs-own three-year math runs the full numbers, and the deeper booking-specific field is in the best self-hosted booking systems.
The honest chooser
- Want free + full-featured and can run Node: Cal.com.
- Want free on cheap PHP hosting, simple needs: Easy!Appointments.
- Want conflict-proof booking with deposits, bought once, on the same cheap hosting: Slotly.
- Want zero ops and don't mind a per-seat meter: stay on Calendly — that's the honest trade.
Every vendor figure in this category also lives in the Price Observatory — verified, dated, and source-linked, free to cite — and the calculator turns those figures into your own three-year number in ten seconds. Selected apps can also be hosted for you on Ownware Cloud — the honest trade-off guide covers when that's worth it.