Why I built Tymeslot

I put out the first version of Tymeslot two days ago. I built it because I looked at every scheduling tool I could find, and I did not want to use any of them.

A booking page is a first impression

Here is the part most scheduling tools forget. The booking page is often the first thing a potential client sees of you. It sits between you and the person trying to give you their time, and it speaks for you while you are not in the room.

So it should look like you mean it. Most of them do not. Calendly works, and millions of people rely on it, but the booking page has looked much the same for years, and it shows. You send someone a link to pick a time and they land on something that feels a decade old. I did not want my work fronted by a page like that.

I wanted a booking page that is genuinely nice to look at. Properly designed, down to the spacing and the type. Most tools give you a logo slot and an accent-colour picker and call that customisation. I wanted the design itself to be good, and that turned out to be most of the reason Tymeslot exists.

Two designed themes to start from, not a logo slot and a colour picker.

The open option was too heavy

If you care about owning your tools, the honest answer in this space is cal.com. It is open source, which matters to me, and it is capable.

It is also a lot. Standing it up and keeping it running is a real project, and for one person who just wants their own scheduling on their own server, it is more system than the job calls for. I wanted something you can host yourself without it becoming a second job.

Scheduling should disappear

A booking link is plumbing. It should read your calendar, respect your hours, and get out of the way. Most tools grow the other direction, into suites with seat counts and upgrade prompts wrapped around a job that is actually quite small.

I wanted the opposite. Something that does the scheduling job completely, looks good doing it, and then stops. No charge for inviting a colleague. No feature locked one tier up. You run it yourself if you want to, or I run it for you, and the product is the same either way.

What this first release is

What went out on the 2nd is early. It schedules, it syncs with the calendars I use, it embeds in a page, and it runs on my own box. There is a long list of things it cannot do yet, and I would rather ship it honestly than pretend otherwise.

But the shape is right, and so is the look, and those were the hard parts. The rest is work I am glad to do.