Cal.com: The Open-Source Calendly Alternative

Re:Cal.com: The Open-Source Calendly Alternative by gen220 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @02:30PM (#34508862)

I think this is more a situation of a small group of individuals looking to fund their development of FOSS scheduling software by offering a hosted solution, rather than a company using open source to grow faster.

AFAICT, their goal isn't to monopolize a hosting solution for their software, just to provide a path of minimal resistance to normal people using their software, and fund their lives along the way.

https://cal.com/about lays it out. Looks like they're a team of 15ish people who raised a Series A, but it seems they've gone about it in a pretty thoughtful way (15 years of runway, atm)

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Re:Cal.com: The Open-Source Calendly Alternative by candiddevmike on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @02:32PM (#34508909)

They're venture backed, it's a growth hack: https://cal.com/about

Expect the usual tension of open core shenanigans to eventually play out.

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Re:Cal.com: The Open-Source Calendly Alternative by gen220 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @02:36PM (#34508971)

I mean, when we read that page, it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth -- saying this as somebody who's generally very skeptical of VC-backed FOSS. It seems like the founders have their heads and their hearts in the right place, to the extent that calling it a growth hack feels wrong to me, personally.

But yeah, in the long term I agree with you, it'll probably fall apart in the way you expect within 10 years. It's hard to outlast the financial interest of investors, even if they're you're friends.

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Re:Cal.com: The Open-Source Calendly Alternative by moneywoes on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @03:43PM (#34510030)

Yep, note how the title is "Open Source" not Open Core.

They know what they're doing

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Re:Cal.com: The Open-Source Calendly Alternative by singron on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @12:24AM (#34514732)

This is pretty cool. They are outside of the US, but even if they paid typically higher US salaries, they would still have many years of runway.

It looks like there might be some funny business with MAU and Total Customers. MAU is only 3,500, but they somehow have 50k Total Customers? And they have a free tier? If only 7% of your paying customers use your product, they aren't going to renew. I expect that this doesn't include churn or is actually some kind of cumulative integral counting customer months or something.

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