zcal Reviews

Writing this based on my actual experience using the tool.

Support has been extremely poor. Multiple attempts to get assistance went unanswered, and when responses were provided, the communication from the founder came across as dismissive and unprofessional. That alone makes the product difficult to trust in a business environment.

The more serious issue, however, is the change in deal terms. The original AppSumo listing clearly stated that all future updates were included as part of the lifetime deal. This was a key factor in the purchase decision. That position has since changed, with an additional $99 now being required for updates. This directly contradicts what was communicated at the time of purchase and undermines the value and intent of an LTD for early supporters.

Changing terms after customers have bought in good faith erodes trust and sets a concerning precedent.

I’d also like to note a review integrity concern. Two of the 5-star reviews currently visible appear to be from individuals associated with AppSumo’s affiliate program and show no meaningful purchase or usage history on the platform. In my view, reviews from affiliates or those with a commercial relationship to AppSumo should not be displayed alongside verified buyer feedback, as it makes it difficult for customers to accurately assess real user experience.

Given the lack of support, the shift in promised deal terms, and the overall trust issues, I cannot recommend this product.

For those looking for a reliable scheduling tool on AppSumo, I would instead recommend TidyCal, which has delivered a far more consistent and transparent experience.

I had an opportunity to take another look at the zCal and I just realized that you can connect unlimited calendars to this thing. That is amazing for multi-brand who want to scale. I think personally that this is the perfect tool in an age of Ai where you have the ability to scale faster. This tool is lighter than most tools and have just as much range. I see people talking about support but I have not experienced that. I wish they would open up their API to extend the tool more but they are doing just a few things differently.

I write this as an early paying customer of zcal, having supported the original lifetime deal that promised Tier‑1 access and Pro Plan functionality for a one‑time fee of $49. What follows is not a rant. It’s a sober professional assessment, written for the AppSumo audience, grounded in recent facts and lived experience.

zcal, at its core, is a clean and visually pleasing scheduling tool. The product positioning on zcal.co still emphasizes simplicity, brand customization, smart scheduling links, integrations with major calendar systems, and a modern alternative to incumbents like Calendly. On paper, that positioning remains sound. The interface is friendly, the booking pages look good, and for basic scheduling needs the platform does what it says it does. If you’re discovering zcal today with no historical context, it may look like a reasonable option in a crowded market.

My issue is not with the idea of zcal. It’s with the execution and, more importantly, with the company’s treatment of its earliest believers. With this new offering, zcal has started pushing a $99 Business Plan add‑on. This add‑on gates features that were implicitly, and in some cases explicitly, positioned as part of the original value proposition for LTD backers. That is not a small pricing tweak. It is a fundamental rewriting of the original deal. When a company asks early adopters to pay again to access what they believed they already bought into, trust erodes fast. In advisory work, I often say that pricing is strategy made visible. In this case, the strategy signals short‑term cash extraction rather than long‑term relationship building.
What makes this harder to justify is the platform’s development velocity. Since January 2025, meaningful innovation has been limited. The core experience today feels largely similar to what I used a year ago, with incremental polish rather than substantive expansion. Meanwhile, competitors have moved faster, shipping deeper integrations, better team workflows, and more flexible routing logic. In my own workflow, this stagnation pushed me to switch to Luncal, not out of excitement but out of necessity. I needed momentum from a tool vendor, not silence punctuated by an invoice.

On AppSumo, context matters. The entire ecosystem is built on trust between founders and early adopters. Lifetime deals are not just transactions; they are early partnerships. Introducing a $99 add‑on that effectively re‑sells promised value sends a clear message to that community, and it’s not a flattering one. From a governance and brand stewardship perspective, this is a textbook example of how to weaken your most vocal advocates.
My professional advice is simple and intentionally blunt. If you are a new user evaluating zcal today, go in with your eyes open, read the fine print carefully, and assume that future functionality may sit behind additional paywalls. If you are an LTD backer from the early days, I would urge caution before putting more money into this platform. Past behavior is often the best predictor of future behavior, and the recent signals are not reassuring.

From where I stand, the $99 Business Plan add‑on is less about delivering new value and more about monetizing goodwill that has already been spent. Caveat emptor.

Avoid one of the biggest mistakes businesspeople make. It's not having a booking system for their booking needs. Sending out random links, random hours without time zones is crazy. It's just a lot of back and forth. Trust me, I've been through this in the past. The best thing to do is have a booking system. In this case, I'm going to show you a booking system that's called Zcal, and you'll be able to set this up in less than five minutes. Trust me, it's super easy. Now, there's a deal going on right now that's on a lifetime deal going on right now, and that means that it's going to avoid you from paying a month-to-month payment. So, it starts off at $59, and let me show you what that is going to get you. There's three license tiers available, and they vary by a very small detail, which is the amount of users included. So, tier one is three users, tier two is 10 users, and tier three is 50 users. If you don't need more than three users, then don't pay more. You're good to go with license tier one. If you need more users, tier two or three. Be aware that this is tied to the Pro Plan features from Zcal. Yes, you do get no branding included, but you don't get custom domains. So, if that's a drawback, you will need to jump into the Business Plan, which is an additional add-on. That add-on is going to give you custom domain, custom email domains, unlimited teams, and 750 additional SMS credits. So, license tier one with Business Plan would be the way to go if you want unlimited team members and you want to have that custom domain feature for the link and for the emails. So, it's affordable, $159 for the whole package where you're going to get the unlimited teams and the custom domain and custom link, which is a good offer, okay? So, these are the plans available. Now, how easy is it to set up here a Zcal booking system? It's super easy. First off, you wanna connect your calendars, so go into your account settings here. Go to Calendars, and in Calendars, connect your calendar right here. Currently, you can connect Google Calendar, Outlook, and the Apple Calendar, which is the three main popular calendars out there that you're going to have on your phone, on your desktop, on your Mac, et cetera, which is a good option. Then, you got integrations. You can connect with Zoom. If you connect with, uh, Google, it's going to automatically connect with Meet. If you connect through Outlook, it's going to automatically connect to Teams. And you can connect to Zapier webhooks to send out these details in case you wanna do some further automation, or send this out to an email marketing system. So, if you are already capturing the name and email, send that over to your email marketing system. And if you're going to take in payments, connect your Stripe account. And for analytics, you got Google Analytics and Meta Pixel, which is practically everything you're going to need, so it's super practical. Next thing you want to do is set the availability times, which is super easy right here. In this case, you can set on and off for the days that you don't wanna take in bookings, and then you can set up the time by just clicking on this. Set the time right here. For example, I'm gonna set this up to 1:00 PM because I'm going to set a lunchtime, and then from, for example, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM. So, I added an interval, and it's just super easy to do it right here. You can mark as unavailable too, in case you wanna turn that off. Let's go ahead and apply this. We have two timeframes right here, and I can copy this into every single day of the week, which makes things practical. I don't have to do this manually for every single one of these. Then, I can turn off specific dates. So for example, for the 23rd, I wanna turn that off, and I can go ahead and turn off the whole day, or I can turn off a certain set of hours. In case I know I have to do something, pick up the- the kids at school or something that's specific, there's an, a special event, I can turn off specific hours or the whole day by adding it right here. So, it's pretty good for Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving, and all those, uh, holidays that you'll wanna turn off right here. Then, we're going to set up the type of meetings that you want to allow. In this case, I have set up a 30-minute meeting and a one-hour meeting, and I can create a new meeting super easily. Let me go ahead and edit one of these so you understand how easy it is to create and edit. So first off, set a name, the duration of this event. You can set a custom duration in case these don't work out for you. You can show multiple duration options, so you can allow that for the users to select. The location, if you want to add that here, quick description, the custom URL. This is my link. I don't have custom URL in this case, but I can set up the slug right here super easily. Then, the desktop layout. You already saw a quick layout of how I have it. You can go ahead and change it right here really easily, depending on your use case. Then, we have the story image that you can add right here. In this case, I've added a random video. I can record a video right here just saying like, "Hey, I truly wish to meet you. I wanna set up a meeting," blah, blah, blah. "This or this meeting is for such and such thing. Please be aware." Whatever you want, okay? Or just add a random video like I did in this case just for testing purposes. Hit Next. Then, I have my available time settings right here. So, 30 minutes, uh, maximize the available time slots. If you want to turn that off, you can do so here. The date range, so 30 days into the future. You don't want to allow them to book further than that. Maybe you have things that might change in the future, so you can turn this on or off, or just set it up right here. And we are using the saved availability times from the general times. If we want to set a- set up a specific timeframe for this specific service, use custom hours and set it up right here. So, this will be different from the one that is general, in case you wanna turn that off or on, okay? In this case, I'm gonna use the same times, and I can block external events. If I turn this on, it's going to block the specific dates if I already have something booked there, okay? Let's jump into the next section here. Then, we have the option to add custom questions. By default, it's going to ask name and the email, but I can set up custom questions right here. For example, um, what is your level? And just a quick question here, uh, level one, level two, uh, level three, in case that's something that's relevant for you, and go ahead and save and you're good to go. That's something that's gonna be asked when they are booking this specific service, okay? Then, we have the invite local timezones or lock timezone. So, it's up to you if you wanna turn one of these on or off.Show the intro or not, show on your profile page, yes, we do want it to show there. Limit booking frequency, that means that this might be a service that takes a lot of your time, energy, and you say, "You know what? I can only do three per day in case I'm getting too many invites," just three and lock that date. You can set it up right here or just turn it off and get as many as you want. Minimum notice, so six hours before they can't book, maybe I would say a day or two, you wanna be prepared. It's up to you how you want to set this up. The- be- the buffer time for before and after, so it locks out those buffer times so it's not one meeting after another. There- it might- a meeting might take a bit longer so you wanna have a buffer time, or you wanna take a quick break, so you can set that up right here. The e-mail notifications, so remind them one day after. You can add more reminders, for example, four days before, too, and you can set that up right here. Custom confirmation e-mail, you can set it up right here. Just hit Edit and edit that e-mail right here. Follow-up e-mail, you can also set that up right here and edit. The SMS reminder, if you wanna turn that on, also for the days before, you do get some credits in the lifetime deal. The schedule options, the allow guests, if you want to allow guests. Only work e-mails, that means that you won't allow Outlook, Gmail, et cetera, and that might be a good idea or not. It's up to you if you wanna set- turn that on or not. Hide reschedule and cancel links, so they can't reschedule or cancel links. I would leave this on, because if they need to cancel, just go ahead and cancel. Uh, there's no wasting my time by jumping into the meeting and they're not going to be there, okay? The redirect on booking, in this case, I turned it on. You can turn this off. You can send them into your main page, a coupon page, a sales page, uh, whatever you wanna set this up for, okay? The custom write calendar, so you can set this up right here. So it's gonna write it into this calendar or into a different calendar. And you can accept payments if you have integrated the Stripe account. In this case, I don't have that set up. Once you're good to go, go ahead and save it, and we're good to go. We have a brand new link. We can jump to it right here and we can start scheduling. So, that's the video I have added right here, and it's gonna display the available time slots right here. Just go ahead and select it, 12:00 PM. Here we go, set up my details. What level am I? I'm level two, for example. A phone number, and we're good to go. Phone number is needed because you are going to send out an SMS. If you don't want to have that available, go ahead and turn it off, right? But it's super easy. I can also copy time, so if I wanna copy and paste this into an e-mail, that's super easy. If I want to embed this on my website, which is a workaround for the custom domain, so if you're not getting custom domain, embed this on your website and you're gonna use your domain from the website, which is a good idea if you wanna do that here. But it's just super easy to set up your calendar here on ZCal. But it's super easy to set up your booking system here on ZCal. Now, if you have team members, you can set those up right here in the team section. Create a team and then invite them right here. So, you got your members, go ahead and invite the team members straight from here. So, that will be limited to the members that you have on the lifetime deal plan. But it's amazingly easy to have a booking system, so if you don't have one right now, go ahead and jump into the link provided in the description. Grab ZCal before it's gone, because this lifetime deal doesn't last long, and it's a great option if you need that booking system. So, what are you waiting for? Check it out, and that is a wrap.

This company has all the potential in the world. Exactly what users want, if they’d put more time into developing the software. Right now, i’m unsure if the team is lazy or if there’s some sort of disconnect. People have said the support is non existent or rude, i haven’t experienced that, but i have noticed little/no change over the past year. I’m not sure why they aren’t making this a 10/10 product when it’s a 10/10 idea. It’s beautiful, but not the most functional.