SavvyCal Meeting Polls: Free Group Scheduling, Webhooks and Limits

What SavvyCal meeting polls are, and why they cost nothing

A meeting poll solves a different problem from a scheduling link. Instead of publishing your open hours and letting one person grab a slot, you propose a handful of times to a group and collect votes on the ones that suit them. SavvyCal's help center describes polls exactly that way: several slots offered to a group, votes gathered, and anyone with the poll link can vote ^[1]. It is the classic group-scheduling job, the one people used to hand to a shared spreadsheet or a reply-all thread.

The headline for most readers is the price. SavvyCal's polls page says polls are free, carry no ads and need no credit card ^[2]. That is unusual for this product. SavvyCal has no free scheduling plan, so your own booking links only go live for other people once you pay. A free account can still be created and set up, can run unlimited meeting polls, can overlay its calendar on other people's SavvyCal links and can join meetings as a guest. Polls are the one organizer tool you can use without a subscription. Our guide to whether SavvyCal is free covers the rest of that line.

Creating a poll, step by step

The poll builder follows a short path. SavvyCal documents it more lightly than its links, as the help center's Meeting Polls category holds a single article, against 32 for scheduling links. The steps below combine that article with the polls page, the changelog and the API's poll schema. You start from a free or paid account; nothing in the flow asks for a card. The order matters less than the choices, so read the notes after the list before you send anything.

1. Name the poll and set a duration. Each poll carries a name, an optional description and a duration in minutes, which is how the API models it too.
2. Propose the time slots. Pick the candidate times you want the group to vote on. Keep the list short enough that people actually answer.
3. Add teammates if they must attend. Optionally, you can add teammates ahead of time, and SavvyCal suggests slots when they are likely free.
4. Decide whether votes are public. You can let voters see who else voted for which times. SavvyCal pitches this as a way to build consensus.
5. Publish and share the link. Send the poll URL by email, chat or a calendar note. Anyone holding it can vote.

Two of those choices deserve more thought than they get. The teammate option matters when the poll is for an internal group, because it keeps you from proposing times that half your own side cannot make. Public votes cut both ways. Seeing that most people chose Thursday nudges the last voters toward it, which is the point, but some groups prefer private answers.

Changing a poll after it goes out

Plans shift after a poll is sent, and since September 2023 SavvyCal lets you modify poll slots after publishing. The changelog framed it as a response to popular demand. The same update lets voters resubmit and change their own response, so a person who answered early can revise once the new slots appear. You do not need to start a fresh poll and chase everyone again.

The API's poll object shows the life cycle behind this. A poll can be in one of four states: draft, published, complete or deleted. Draft is the builder stage before anyone sees it. Published is the live stage when votes come in, and the stage where slot edits now happen. Complete marks a poll whose job is done. Deleted removes it. Those states are useful if you track polls from your own system, which we come back to in the developer section. For everyday use, they mean you can leave a poll published while people trickle in, adjust the slots if a holiday or a deadline moves, and close it when the answer is clear.

What voters see when they open the poll

The voter side is deliberately simple. Recipients vote in their own time zone, so a client in London and a contractor in Denver both see the proposed slots converted to their local clocks. That removes the most common group-scheduling mistake, the meeting someone joins an hour late because they read the time in the wrong zone. If you allowed public responses, voters also see who picked which slots before they answer.

Voters do not need a paid account. Anyone with the link can vote, and SavvyCal's free tier explicitly includes sharing availability and taking part as a guest. One point needs care, though. SavvyCal's best-known feature, the calendar overlay that lays a visitor's own events over your open times, is documented for scheduling links and booking pages. The poll pages we read do not describe an overlay inside the poll itself, so do not promise voters one. A person who already has a free SavvyCal account can still overlay their calendar on your regular scheduling links, which is often the next step after a poll settles a recurring series.

From the winning slot to a booked meeting

A poll only matters if it ends in a calendar event, and here SavvyCal's documentation is thinner than its marketing. The help center article explains proposing slots and gathering votes. It does not walk through the finishing step in detail. What the data model does show is that a meeting can stay linked to its poll. Every event in the API carries an optional field for an associated poll, alongside any additional information supplied at booking, and the events export from the app includes a poll ID column by default.

In practice that gives you a clean trail. Once the votes point to a slot, the event that follows can carry the poll reference, and you can mark the poll complete. Anyone pulling an events export later can tell which meetings came out of polls and which came from ordinary links. For teams that report on how meetings get booked, that is worth more than it sounds. It is also a reason to keep each poll focused on one meeting rather than reusing it.

Poll webhooks and what the API exposes

Developers get two poll events and a read model, but no poll endpoint. SavvyCal's webhook list, 16 event types in the developer docs, includes poll.response.created, fired when someone submits a new response, and poll.response.updated, fired when a voter changes an existing one ^[3]. Webhooks arrive as HTTP POST requests over HTTPS. Each is signed with an HMAC SHA-256 signature in the x-savvycal-signature header, using a secret unique to that webhook. Failed deliveries are retried with exponential backoff on any non-2xx response, so your endpoint should answer quickly with a 200 OK.

The REST API side is a schema without a route. The API reference is organized into Events, Scheduling Links, Current User, Time Zones, Webhooks and Workflows, and there is no section for polls. You cannot list or create polls through the API. What you do get are three poll schemas. A Poll has a description, a duration in minutes, a state, a URL, a publicize-responses flag and an optional scope, meaning the team it belongs to. A PollPreview holds an ID, a name and a slug. A PollResponse records the respondent's display name and the time it was created. These objects reach you inside webhook payloads and on events linked to a poll. Our SavvyCal API guide covers authentication and the full webhook catalog.

Branding a poll and putting it on your domain

Both paid plans include colors, an avatar and a banner for your account, though the poll pages we read do not detail how polls are styled. The bigger step, a custom domain, is Premium-only. SavvyCal's custom domains cover links, profiles and polls, so on Premium a poll can sit on an address under your own company domain rather than savvycal.com. Premium costs $20 per user a month billed monthly, or $17 billed annually.

That creates an odd split for a free feature. You can run unlimited polls without paying anything, but the polished, own-domain version needs the top plan. For most groups, such as a volunteer committee, a family reunion or a cross-company project kickoff, the savvycal.com address is fine. A consultancy that sends polls to clients every week may care more, since a branded address looks more established in a client's inbox. Weigh that against Basic, at $12 per user a month billed monthly or $10 billed annually, which already activates your links but does not add the custom domain.

How SavvyCal compares its polls with Doodle and When2meet

SavvyCal sells polls partly against two older names, and its claims are worth reading with their dates. Its Doodle page, from February 2022, says the free version of Doodle is supported by ads. Its current Doodle alternative page repeats that Doodle advertises to your recipients, while calling Doodle a pioneer in group scheduling. Its When2meet page, from May 2022, says When2meet is free, funded by ads and donations, and has no calendar integration and no confirmation emails. These are SavvyCal's statements about rivals, several years old, and we have not checked them against the rivals' own pages.

Inside our own catalog, polls are not rare. Calendly lists meeting polls among its scheduling capabilities, TidyCal offers date polls, and YouCanBookMe includes meeting polls on its free plan. So the case for SavvyCal polls is not that nobody else has them. It is that they are free, without ads, on an account that can grow into paid scheduling links later. If you already pay for one of those tools, its own polls may be enough.

When a poll beats a scheduling link

The choice comes down to who controls the options. A scheduling link publishes your availability and lets one person pick, which works for inbound demand like sales calls, client sessions or interviews. A poll fits when several people must agree and no single calendar holds the answer. Think of a board meeting, a group workshop, a kickoff with a client team, or a call with people from three companies who do not share calendars.

Polls also win on cost when you schedule rarely. If you only coordinate a group meeting now and then, a free account with polls may be all you need. Links win once meetings repeat or need structure. Round robin, collective availability across teammates, payment through Stripe and reminder workflows all sit on scheduling links, and every one of them needs a paid plan ^[4]. For a team weighing those modes, our guide to SavvyCal team scheduling covers collective and round robin links in depth.

The bottom line

SavvyCal meeting polls are a genuinely free tool on an otherwise paid product: unlimited polls, no ads, no card, votes in each person's own time zone, editable slots after publishing and optional public responses. Developers can follow responses through two webhooks and see poll objects on linked events, though there is no poll endpoint. The limits are documentation depth and branding, since the help center holds one poll article and custom domains need Premium. Use a poll to pick a time with a group. Use a paid link when meetings repeat.