Talking to customers · Edition No. 5 · 30 Aug 2026

calcom/cal.diy

The MIT community fork of Cal.com after the company went closed source — a booking link for user interviews and demos.

← Talking to customersRead the whole edition →

48.3k stars · MIT · v6.2.0 (2026-03-01)

The MIT community fork of Cal.com after the company went closed source — a booking link for user interviews and demos.

Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install

What it is

A self-hosted scheduling platform — the open-source answer to Calendly — where you publish a link, someone picks a slot, and it writes the meeting into your calendar and sends the invitations. As of this year it is the community fork: Cal.com the company moved its product to closed source, and cal.diy is what remains, 100% MIT with the enterprise code stripped out.

Why it matters

The thing a solo founder before product-market fit needs most is conversations with the handful of people who did show up, and the thing that kills those conversations is six emails about time zones. A booking link at the bottom of every video description, every comment reply and every email turns "we should talk sometime" into a slot in your calendar. It is also, unglamorously, how you get testimonials and case studies — you cannot write one about a user you have never spoken to. Read the second half of this entry carefully though, because the licence story here is the most instructive thing on today's page.

Stars48.3k
LicenceMIT
Latestv6.2.0 (2026-03-01)checked 7 Sep 2026
Written inTypeScript
NeedsDocker Compose, Docker and PostgreSQL
RunsSelf-hosted on your own server
Setup effort
1 / 5
Payoff
4 / 5
Good
  • Fully MIT with no enterprise tier held back — which is more than can be said for half of what this radar has recommended you
  • Enormous accumulated feature set: buffers, time zones, round-robin, payments, calendar sync in both directions
  • A booking page costs you nothing to publish and starts working the day you paste the link somewhere
Watch for
  • The company behind it has walked away. A fork with the commercial code removed is only as alive as the volunteers who pick it up; the most recent tagged release is v6.2.0 from 1 March 2026. Treat it as a tool you use, not a dependency you build on
  • Self-hosting it is a heavy Next.js stack plus its own database plus Google/Microsoft calendar OAuth plus an SMTP provider. This is not an evening
  • Cal.com's own hosted free tier still exists and is genuinely the sensible starting point — the self-host is a project, and you do not need a project to get a booking link
How to get it

Start with the hosted free tier: no VPS cost, no code, a link you paste into your YouTube descriptions and your Starlight docs footer today.

Get the next edition in your inbox

A dozen repositories, opened and checked. The licence read, the last release dated, and the ones that did not make it named with the reason. It is the half most lists leave out.

No tracking pixels. One click to leave. The archive stays free either way.

We use your address to send the edition and nothing else. Confirm by email, leave in one click. How we handle it.