Calendly alternatives without a monthly subscription
· 3 min read
Most scheduling tools are priced per seat, per month. That is fair if a booking page runs your whole business every day. It is a poor fit if you take a handful of paid sessions a month, run a class now and then, or share one page with a colleague who books twice a quarter. You pay the same in a quiet month as in a busy one.
There are four other ways to pay for a booking page: per booking, once, nothing at all, or with your own server. Below is what each looks like in practice, with prices checked on 24 October 2026.
Pay per booking: BooknTalk
BooknTalk has no monthly fee. It charges €1 for each paid booking, whatever the session costs, and refunds that euro if you refund the client. Free events stay free, so an open evening with thirty sign-ups costs nothing. Clients pay up front through Stripe, into your own Stripe account, and every booking gets a video room in the browser without a Zoom or Google account. It also handles group classes with a seat limit, where each attendee books and pays for their own seat.
The catch: every session is booked and paid on its own, so you cannot sell a package of sessions as one purchase. If most of your bookings are free calls, a per-booking price has nothing to charge, and a free plan elsewhere may suit you just as well.
Disclosure: BooknTalk is made by the same person who runs unsubs.org, and it is marked as featured here. Featured and sponsored placements never change the order of the organic lists, see how the site works.
Buy once: TidyCal
TidyCal sells an Individual lifetime licence for a one-time $29, which adds group bookings and API access to its free features. An Agency lifetime licence at $79 adds team pages, round robin and collective meetings. There is also a monthly Pro plan, so make sure you pick the lifetime option if you want to avoid a subscription.
The catch: on the free and lifetime plans TidyCal adds a 1% platform fee on bookings paid through Stripe, which only the monthly plan removes. Zoom, Teams and Zapier integrations also sit on the paid plans. For low-priced sessions the 1% is small; for expensive ones it starts to add up.
Free: Google Calendar booking pages
If you already use Google Calendar, a personal Google account includes one appointment booking page at no cost. It shows your free time, lets people pick a slot and puts the booking in your calendar.
The catch: taking payments, automatic email reminders, multiple booking pages and checking more than one calendar all need a paid Google Workspace plan, Business Standard or higher, which is itself a per-user monthly subscription. Free is free only while your bookings are free too.
Self-hosted: Easy!Appointments and Cal.diy
Easy!Appointments is an open-source scheduler under the GPL-3.0 licence that you install on your own server. It syncs with Google Calendar and has no licence fee. Online payments are not part of the core feature set, so plan on handling payment separately.
Cal.diy is the community-maintained, MIT-licensed continuation of the old open-source Cal.com code. Cal.com itself went closed source in April 2026, and Cal.diy lacks teams, workflows and routing forms. Its own maintainers recommend it for personal, non-production use, so treat it as a project for tinkerers rather than a business tool.
The catch with both: self-hosting is free in licence fees, not in time. You pay for the server, and you are the one who applies updates, keeps backups and fixes it when a calendar integration changes.
Which one fits
| If you… | Look at | What you pay |
|---|---|---|
| Take paid sessions or classes, some months more than others | BooknTalk | €1 per paid booking |
| Want to pay once and mostly take free bookings | TidyCal lifetime | $29 once, plus 1% on Stripe bookings |
| Need one simple free page and no payments | Google Calendar | Nothing |
| Want full control and enjoy running servers | Easy!Appointments | Your server and your time |
The honest test is to count last quarter's bookings and divide your subscription by that number. If the answer is more than a couple of euros per booking, a monthly plan is probably costing you more than it needs to. The full list for each tool is on the alternatives pages for Calendly, Acuity Scheduling, SavvyCal and YouCanBook.me, and in the scheduling category.