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 billed annually (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged). Per seat is the part that bites: a 3-person team on Standard is $30/month — $1,080 over three years, for scheduling. The free tier's limit is worth stating precisely, because it is not a seat count: it holds "One event type" and "One calendar connection". *Anyone offering a consultation and* a follow-up has outgrown it without hiring a soul. At the far end, Teams is $16/seat and Enterprise "Starts at $15k/yr" on a 50-seat minimum** (all read 5 September 2026).
- Acuity Scheduling (Squarespace) — Starter $16/month billed annually, $20 billed monthly (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged), then Standard $27/$34 and Premium $49/$61. (An earlier version of this line read "scaling up through $20–$61 tiers", which mixed the monthly column into the tier ladder; the two ladders are set out separately above.) Flat-per-account rather than per-seat, but still a permanent meter — and it counts calendars instead of people: one on Starter, up to six on Standard, up to thirty-six on Premium.
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. It describes itself as "A fully customizable scheduling software for individuals, businesses taking calls and developers building scheduling platforms", and self-hosting is still offered (read 5 September 2026). 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.
One thing worth knowing before "just use Cal.com" is taken as the cheap answer: its own hosted plans are per-seat too, and not cheaper than the incumbent — Teams at $12 per user per month and Organizations at $28, billed yearly, above a free tier (re-read 11 October 2026). Cal.com is the free option when you run it yourself. Paying Cal.com to run it costs more per seat than Calendly Standard.
- Easy!Appointments — the classic open-source PHP scheduler on ordinary LAMP hosting: services, providers, working plans. Its own page calls it "100% free and Open Source" with "No monthly fees", usable "even for commercial use", on Apache or Nginx with PHP and MySQL (read 5 September 2026). 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. (Optional paid Premium Services — custom development, managed hosting, white labeling, migration and support — sit beside the free software; none is required to run it.)
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 $99 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. Since the 3.0 release it also carries a REST API and an MCP endpoint — the direct answer to "self-hosted booking, simple to use, with an API".
Try the Slotly demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Honest limits, in plain text before you pay: card payments at booking only through your own Stripe account and off until you switch them on (otherwise deposits are quoted and tracked beside your own payment link), and Slotly never touches the card; a 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 $99 one-time purchase breaks even in the fourth month, and then the meter stops — over three years that is $1,080 rented versus $99 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 — or the Studio Suite if waivers, memberships and the door sign-in come with it.
- 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. Slotly can also be hosted for you on Ownware Cloud — the honest trade-off guide covers when that's worth it.