Scheduling and meetings decision
Acuity Scheduling
A competent developer can build a usable scheduling system covering bookings, calendar sync, reminders, and payments in ~one week and low monthly hosting/API costs, but replicating Acuity’s enterprise-grade HIPAA offering, broad integrations, large customer support operation, and brand polish would be costly—so build a narrow replacement but keep paying for full product features and compliance.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Allow clients to view availability and self-book; record appointments in a central calendar; sync with external calendars; send confirmations/reminders; accept payments/deposits.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise features and centralized multi-location dashboard
- HIPAA-ready signed BAA and associated compliance guarantees
- Breadth and polish of Acuity’s many third-party integrations
- Award-winning support and product polish (mobile apps, UX)
- Advanced features like built-in invoicing/POS and gift-certificate flows
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
Sign BAA for HIPAA compliance
- Brand trust
Our global award-winning team of real (awesome) humans proudly support over 250,000 customers.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal appointment-scheduling service using Next.js (React) frontend, Node.js/Express API, and Postgres (hosted on a small managed DB). In scope: public booking page with intake form, user/admin sign-in, appointment CRUD, Google/Outlook calendar two-way sync (OAuth), email reminders (SMTP/Postmark), SMS via Twilio, Stripe payment/deposit capture, and a simple admin calendar UI with drag/drop reschedule. Out of scope: multi-tenant enterprise dashboard, signed HIPAA BAA/legal work, built mobile apps, and large-scale analytics. Provide error handling, input validation, end-to-end tests for booking and payment flows, and deployment scripts (Docker + cloud host like DigitalOcean or AWS with a $20/month small instance).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAcuity Scheduling: Online Booking & Appointment Scheduling Software
- official pricingAcuity Scheduling Pricing Plans & Features
- official docsAcuity Scheduling Features
- open sourcealextselegidis/easyappointments
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
