Update, September 2026: Calndr.link became AddCal in 2026. Same product, same free plan, new name, and the old calndr.link links still work. I've rewritten this post rather than leave a six-year-old one up.
Why I built it
In 2020 every business went online at once and I had multiple clients in the same month asking for help scheduling online events. AddEvent was the tool for add to calendar links, and it wanted $20 a month for what amounted to generating a few URLs in the right format for each calendar app. So I built a free one and put it at calndr.link.
What AddCal does now
It grew into the thing people actually needed around the link.
One link for every calendar. You share a single URL. Whoever clicks it lands on an event page and picks Google, Apple, Outlook, Office 365 or Yahoo, or the page works out which one they use and skips the picker. The link stays editable after you send it, so a time change goes out to everyone without a new email.
Subscription calendars. Publish a calendar once, people subscribe from their own app, and new or changed events show up for them automatically. Good for schools, clubs, teams, anything recurring.
RSVP. Real invites with Yes, No and Maybe buttons, custom registration forms, confirmations and reminder emails.
Embeds. A branded calendar or an add to calendar button on your own site, one snippet.
Automation. An API and webhooks on every plan including free. Smart Links create an event from a URL and are idempotent, so a Zap or webhook that fires twice never makes a duplicate. Zapier and Zoom are wired in.
Custom domains on paid plans, so the link carries your name, not ours.
It's served somewhere north of 25 million calendar adds so far.
How it compares to AddEvent
| AddEvent | AddCal | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 100 adds/month, then links are disabled | Unlimited adds, links never switch off |
| API on free plan | No | Yes |
| Webhooks | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | $29/month | $12/month (Premium, yearly) |
| Pro tier | $99/month | $20/month (Business, yearly) |
| CMS plugins (WordPress, Webflow, Wix) | Yes | No |
| Drag and drop design editor | Yes | No |
The free-plan row is the one that matters. AddEvent disables your add to calendar links once you pass 100 adds in a month, which is exactly when an event is going well. AddCal's free plan has no cap on adds or clicks. It does cap you at 10 events a month, so if you publish dozens of small events on a free plan, AddEvent's free tier suits you better and I'd rather say so than have you find out.
The last two rows are real. If your workflow lives inside WordPress or Webflow, AddEvent's native plugins are a genuine advantage today. We have an embed snippet, not a plugin.
Full feature by feature comparison, a cost calculator and a one click importer for AddEvent accounts: addcal.co/alternatives/addevent. If you import your AddEvent data you get the first month of Premium or Business free.
Who it's for
People sending an event to a list: newsletters, launches, webinars, community calendars, school terms, church schedules. If you have a date and an audience and want more of them to show up, that's the job.
It is not a scheduling tool. If you want people to book a slot with you, that's Calendly or Cal.com. AddCal is for the event that already has a time.
The tech, briefly
The 2020 version was Laravel 7 with Inertia.js on Google Cloud Run. It's still serverless, but it moved: Laravel 13 on Octane, deployed as Bref 3 container images to AWS Lambda, SQS for queues, Inertia and Vue 3 on the front. The traffic pattern that justified serverless in 2020 hasn't changed. One big newsletter send is tens of thousands of clicks in an hour, then nothing, and paying per request still beats keeping a box warm for that.
One thing I'd tell 2020 me: on Lambda there is no "after the response". The environment freezes when the handler returns, so anything you want off the request goes on a queue, not in a deferred callback.
Questions, or want a comparison against a different tool, leave a comment or find me at AddCal.
Top comments (10)
Looking forward to your article on deploying Laravel based app on Cloud Run. I have used AWS however, running Laravel on AWS serverless is something which I have not been able to do. And, I fell your article can help.
This truly is a life savior! It's exactly what our non-profit was looking for - thank you!!
Just one glitch that I found. When opening the Google Calendar link, the event will always shows the time zone as "(GMT+00:00) Coordinated Universal Time" regardless of what time zone was used to generate the event, however the start/end times are adjusted...so it ends up in your calendar with the right times...although if you open the event you will still see the wrong time zone and adjusted hours, which could cause some confusion. I'm not sure if this is something you can fix with how you pass in the time zone or not. It works perfectly for Apple, Outlook, and Yahoo! however.
Thanks again!
Really, you are a life savior! All those services are very expensive for small businesses like me that only run small events occasionally, but your solution is really helpful! Thanks!
(I'm joining Dev just to leave this comment haha)
Looking great and super easy to use, however can't figure out how to change the time of the meeting. Any help welcome!
Every event that you create has an edit link above the event title. Use that to make all kinds of changes to the event.
Goodness. THANK YOU. I was looking at spending $1188/year with AddEvent and as a solo entrepreneur that was really going to hurt. Definitely buying you (many) coffees via your link on the site.
Ahhh... would there be an option to allow it to be a reoccurring event that happens at the same time every week? I'll keep this filed for one-off events for now but I need something that will allow students to add a reoccurring class time to their calendars. Thank you!
Thanks a lot for your dev! Is there any chance to add Office 365 Calendar option?
Perfect tool and API.
Thanks!
Is there an option to allow it to be a reoccurring event that happens at the same time every week? Thank you!