TidyCal Buyer's Checklist: 65 Questions to Answer Before You Pay

How to use this checklist

Answer each check with your real setup, not your hopes, because each answer either points to a plan or rules TidyCal out. TidyCal has four plans: Free, Individual Lifetime, Agency Lifetime and Pro, and the limits on lifetime plans depend on the purchase date. The checks are ordered so the quickest disqualifiers come early. A single no on calendars, webhooks, health data or a phone app settles the question faster than any price comparison. TidyCal, made by AppSumo, targets services businesses: coaches, consultants, therapists, tutors, agencies and freelancers. Sales teams and clinics will hit several no answers. Start at the top.

Calendars: is one enough?

Free reads one calendar for conflicts. If all your busy time sits in one calendar, Free works; if you split work, personal and family calendars, you need a paid plan. Individual Lifetime and Agency Lifetime read up to 10 calendars, and Pro reads unlimited ^[1], while Agency licenses bought before September 1, 2026 read 25. Count reading-enabled calendars, not accounts, since every reading calendar is checked for every booking type. A consultant with a Google work calendar, an iCloud family calendar and a shared Outlook calendar from a client needs three, which Individual Lifetime covers for $29 once and Free cannot handle at all.

• Check your providers. TidyCal connects Google, Microsoft 365 and Apple iCloud, and Apple needs an app-specific password. Google and Microsoft update within minutes; iCloud is polled every two minutes at most while in use.
• Rule out Proton and CalDAV. Proton Calendar and self-hosted CalDAV cannot be connected, and there is no separate option for an on-premises Exchange server. That is a hard stop.
• Ask IT about work accounts. Microsoft 365 work or school accounts may need IT admin approval to connect. A blocked connection leaves you with no conflict checks.

Team size, seats and the license date

Free and Individual Lifetime have no teams. New Agency Lifetime licenses seat 4 including the owner, and Pro has unlimited members. Count every host, because each needs an account, and remember that pending invitations count toward the 4-seat limit on new Agency licenses. Team invitations do not expire, so clean up old ones first. A team of five hosts already exceeds a new Agency Lifetime license. The realistic choice for that team is Pro at $99 a year, which has no seat limit and also removes branding and the platform fee.

Write down the purchase date of any lifetime license, because limits follow it. Agency Lifetime bought before September 1, 2026 keeps unlimited members, 25 calendars, 20 SMS segments and a custom domain, and Individual Lifetime bought before the April 2026 Pro launch keeps a custom domain. Plans also belong to each person, not the team. Team booking types follow the owner's plan, but Zapier and the API follow each member's own plan.

• Round robin. It needs Agency Lifetime or Pro and sends each booking to one free host. Round robin and group bookings do not combine.
• Fair rotation. TidyCal assigns by five priority levels with random ties, with no sequential rotation and no workload tracking, and a rescheduled booking may change host. If fairness is promised to staff, TidyCal falls short.
• Collective meetings. They show a slot only when every assigned host is free and need Agency Lifetime or Pro. TidyCal recommends them for teams of 2 to 4 people.

Payments: what you sell and what it costs

Every plan, Free included, takes paid bookings through Stripe or PayPal. Each booking type sets its own price and currency, clients pay at booking, and declined cards trigger automatic recovery emails. PayPal carries no TidyCal platform fee, and Venmo appears for eligible US buyers. But PayPal cannot run subscriptions, recurring charges, storefront sales or cancellation fees. Single sessions only. Anything beyond one-off appointments depends on Stripe.

The 1% checkout line

On Free and lifetime plans, Stripe payments carry a 1% platform fee, and by default the client pays it as a separate line ^[2]. On a $90 coaching session the client sees $90.90 at checkout before Stripe's own fee. Some clients will ask about it. Lifetime owners can choose to cover the fee from their payout, account-wide; Free users cannot, and Pro removes the fee entirely. Absorbing the fee costs a lifetime owner $120 a year on $1,000 of monthly Stripe sales, by our arithmetic. At that volume Pro at $99 a year is the cheaper way to keep prices round.

Plans without a platform fee can process up to $10,000 of sales a month, and above that custom pricing may apply. TidyCal publishes no figure. At $200 a session, a practice reaches the cap at 50 paid sessions a month, by our arithmetic, so a busy two-person team on Pro could plausibly cross it. Ask support before you grow past it, and get the answer in writing.

Packages, recurring sessions and subscriptions

• Packages. Clients pick a set number of dates and pay upfront, on every plan; TidyCal lists 3, 5 and 10 session packs. A package cannot be rescheduled as a whole.
• Recurring weekly sessions. They work on every plan, and paid sessions are charged one by one before each session, through Stripe only. Only bookers can cancel a whole series; hosts cancel one session at a time.
• Subscriptions and retainers. They bill weekly, monthly or yearly with 1 to 100 credits per period, on every plan, and need Stripe. Unused credits do not roll over. TidyCal does not email subscribers about failed renewals, so check the subscriber list each period.

Deposits, fees and extras

TidyCal has no deposit or partial-payment option, so the full price is charged at booking. A wedding officiant who wants to hold a date with a small payment cannot take a deposit natively; TidyCal's own industry page suggests a separate date-hold booking type, which works but leaves the remaining balance to be collected outside TidyCal. A flat cancellation and no-show fee does work on Stripe paid bookings with a paid plan. It never applies to PayPal bookings, rescheduling never triggers it, and it is charged at most once per booking. If deposits matter, TidyCal is not the tool.

• Digital products. The storefront sells PDF, EPUB or ZIP files up to 64 MB on every plan, through Stripe only. Up to 3 products can be added to a booking type, and download links last 72 hours.
• Coupons. They come on every plan, as a percentage, a fixed amount or free. Usage can be limited per booker email, not as a total.

Booking rules: video, groups and control

Automatic Zoom, Google Meet and Teams links need a paid plan, while Free users paste one custom link. Rescheduling keeps Zoom and Meet links but replaces Teams links. Teams links also need a Microsoft 365 Business or Education account, personal Microsoft accounts usually cannot generate them, and one help article says they cannot be used at all. Test before buying. Meet is easier. Free users get one location per booking type, while paid plans let clients choose among several, with each video provider usable once per type.

Group classes need a paid plan too, since Free saves classes with one seat. Group bookings allow 2 to 10,000 attendees per slot, each attendee pays separately unless guests are invited, and group sessions share one Teams meeting per slot. A yoga studio running a 20-person class five times a week can sell it on Individual Lifetime for $29 once. Paid plans also unlock these controls.

• Booking limits. Daily, weekly, monthly or total caps need a paid plan and count only that booking type. There is no global cap across all types, and canceled bookings do not count.
• Manual approval. It needs a paid plan and is set per booking type. Paid requests are charged at request time, a rejection does not refund automatically, and requests never expire. Refund manually when rejecting.
• Late reschedules. On Free, clients can reschedule until the booking starts. Paid plans can turn rescheduling off or set a cutoff, and rescheduling has no payment step.
• File uploads. Booking forms take none. Clients must email documents separately.

Reminders and the emails clients see

SMS reminders need Agency Lifetime or Pro. New Agency licenses get 10 segments a month and Pro unlimited, up to two texts per booking type are allowed, and when the allowance runs out, texts are skipped. A new Agency license's 10 segments cover about ten single-text reminders a month, so a practice with 40 appointments a month that wants one text each needs Pro. Texts reach only US and Canadian mobile numbers. Clients elsewhere get email reminders only, so an international practice loses texts on any plan, even though email still works.

Custom confirmation and reminder templates need a paid plan, while cancellation and reschedule emails cannot be customized at all. CC and custom reply-to addresses need a paid plan too. Free uses default emails, and they work fine. What no plan offers is email from your own domain: TidyCal supports no DKIM, SPF or CNAME records for sending, and only the reply-to address can change. Clients will see TidyCal's sender. Branding-sensitive firms should know.

Branding, domain and your public pages

A custom domain needs Pro, or an older lifetime license; new lifetime buyers get none. On custom domains, reCAPTCHA does not run and mutual availability is hidden. Branding is normal on Free, reduced on lifetime plans and removed only on Pro ^[1], and since October 2026 lifetime plans no longer get complete branding removal. If clients must not see TidyCal, budget for Pro. That is $99 a year. Every account can also publish a landing page with 10 sections and 4 themes, though Free shows a prominent footer credit. It suits a starter site, not a full website.

• Languages. Booker pages and emails can appear in 40 language options on every plan, set once per account. Your own titles and questions are not translated, and the website page stays in English.
• Public reviews. Clients can rate bookings 1 to 5 stars on every plan. Reviews publish immediately with no moderation queue, a single review can be deleted but not hidden, and team booking types cannot use review links.

Integrations, developers and the phone

TidyCal does not offer configurable webhooks; the alternatives are Zapier or polling the API ^[3]. If your developers need push events, TidyCal will frustrate them. Decide early. Zapier needs a paid plan, offers three triggers and sends all booking answers in one field, and Mailchimp and similar tools go through it, while SendFox connects natively on every plan. The API needs a paid plan, uses a Bearer token or OAuth, allows 60 requests a minute and lists 19 operations. It creates bookings only for free booking types, so a custom checkout for paid sessions must send clients through TidyCal's own booking page to pay.

The MCP server is read-only and cannot create or cancel bookings, and the MCP docs say Pro is required while help says any paid plan. It exposes booker names, emails, phones and payment status, so a practice that connects it shares that client data with the AI provider. That decision belongs with whoever is responsible for client privacy. There is no built-in Salesforce or HubSpot integration and no two-way CRM sync, although contacts can be exported as CSV on paid plans. Sales teams should look elsewhere.

• Ad tracking. GA4, Tag Manager and the TikTok Events API need a paid plan. There is no native Meta pixel or Google Ads setting.
• A mobile app. There is no TidyCal iOS or Android app; it runs in the phone browser, and the mobile menu lacks Polls, Store and Payments links. If you manage bookings from your phone, test first.

Health data, security and privacy

TidyCal does not sign HIPAA BAAs, and it points therapists who need one to Acuity Premium ^[4]. Its GDPR article mentions no HIPAA certification. Health providers should not store clinical details in intake answers, and even with careful forms, a booking for a therapy session already reveals that a named person sees a therapist. Choose a BAA vendor. On security, TidyCal lists device verification, reCAPTCHA and rate limiting, with no SOC 2 mentioned, and it offers no SSO or SCIM, only sign-in with Google or LinkedIn. Procurement reviews will stall. Plan for that.

TidyCal is based in the United States, and data may be processed outside the EEA; the DPA relies on EU standard contractual clauses for transfers, and no sub-processor list is published. Anyone can request contact data erasure through a public form, and deleting a contact also deletes its bookings. Paid accounts must ask support to delete the account, and the privacy policy says underlying records are kept unless permanent deletion is requested. Request it explicitly.

Switching and testing before you pay

The Calendly importer works on every plan and brings event types, bookings and contacts, with an optional sync that follows Calendly changes. Prices, date overrides and reminders do not carry over, and imported types get new URLs. Our TidyCal vs Calendly comparison covers the rest of that move. TidyCal has no importer for Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho Bookings or SavvyCal; those switches are manual and take about 15 minutes, per TidyCal. There is no CSV contact import either. Rebuild booking types by hand and keep old links live meanwhile.

Free has no time limit and needs no card, while Pro has no free trial, so Free is your test bed. Build your real booking types there, connect Stripe and make a test booking. Remember that payments always run live, so refund your test. If you buy, Pro is refundable within 7 days of purchase, AppSumo refunds lifetime plans within 60 days, and legacy direct lifetime purchases have 60 days of self-service refunds. Know your window. Test inside it.

Support, invoices and the lifetime fine print

Email support is on every plan with a typical 8-hour response, an AI help chat answers first and hands off to email, and priority support is Pro only. There is no phone channel. If minutes matter, TidyCal is slow; if hours do, it works. European businesses should check invoices first: AppSumo issues them for lifetime plans and Stripe emails receipts for Pro, but the Pro billing portal has no field for a tax ID or VAT number. TidyCal also cannot collect clients' VAT IDs as verified tax IDs.

Then weigh the lifetime terms. The AppSumo deal promises all future Lifetime Plan updates, yet in 2026 new licenses lost the custom domain, seats, calendars and SMS, and in October lifetime plans lost complete branding removal. The Terms let TidyCal change fees at any time. Expect change. A buyer should value a lifetime plan only for what it includes today. Our TidyCal lifetime deal guide walks through what each license still includes.

Which plan your answers point to

Choose Free for one calendar and single sessions. Choose Individual Lifetime for video links, groups, limits and approvals, Agency Lifetime for a team of up to 4, and Pro for branding, domains, bigger teams or no fee. Then test before you buy: open a Free account, build one real booking type, connect your calendar and Stripe, and book yourself as a client from your own phone. That run shows the checkout line, the branding and the reminder timing exactly as your clients will see them. Buy only the plan your answers require.