makeabook.ing vs Calendly

TL;DR: Calendly schedules meetings. makeabook.ing sells services. If clients are picking a time to talk to you, Calendly's a fine, well-known tool. If clients are picking what to book — a treatment, a session, a shoot — at a price you've set, that's a different job, and it's the one makeabook.ing is built around.

At a glance

	Calendly	makeabook.ing
Core job	Book a meeting time	Book a service, at a price
Service menu with pricing	Not built in — prices go in free text, if anywhere	Core to how it works
Customer account required	No	No
Pricing model	Per user/month	Flat monthly fee
Free tier	Yes, limited features and event types	Yes, 20 bookings/month, full feature set
Team scheduling, routing forms	Yes — built for this	No — deliberately solo-only
Built for	Sales teams, recruiters, internal meeting coordination	One person running a service business

Where they actually differ

Calendly's entire design is oriented around time slots — you define an "event type" (a 30-minute call, a 1-hour consult) and people book a slot in your calendar. It's genuinely excellent at that, which is why it's become the default reach-for-it tool across sales, recruiting and consulting.

The trouble starts when your business isn't "a meeting" — it's a set of services with different durations, different prices, and sometimes add-ons. You can rename an event type and describe it, but there's no structured price list a client sees before booking, no service-by-service duration logic beyond what you've manually set per event type, and payment collection means wiring up Stripe or PayPal yourself.

makeabook.ing starts from the other end: you list services — each with a duration and a price — and the client picks from that list the way they'd pick from a menu. It's a narrower tool by design. It doesn't do routing forms, team round-robin scheduling, or internal meeting coordination, because none of that is what a solo service business needs.

A worked example

Say you're a personal trainer offering three things: a free 15-minute consultation, a single 45-minute session, and a block of four sessions at a discount. On Calendly, you'd set these up as three separate event types, and you'd likely end up describing the price of each in the event description — since Calendly doesn't have a structured "price" field the way a service listing does — and manually noting that the block needs paying for upfront, probably via a separate payment link.

On makeabook.ing, each of those is a service with its own price attached directly, shown to the client as part of picking what to book. There's no separate step to explain the cost or link out to a payment page — the price is part of the listing itself.

What this means for no-shows and double-bookings

Because Calendly is built around a single "event type" duration, appointments that vary in length — a quick consult vs. a full session — need separate event types with separate links, or manual adjustment each time. Miss that step and you can end up with a 45-minute session booked into a 15-minute slot, or padding your calendar with buffer time to be safe. Service-based duration handling on makeabook.ing means the slot length is already tied to what's actually being booked, so this isn't something you have to manage manually appointment by appointment.

Pricing

Calendly's paid tiers are priced per user, per month — sensible for a five-person sales team, less sensible when the "team" is one person. Its free plan exists but caps out on features and event types.

makeabook.ing is free for the first 20 bookings a month with the full feature set, then a flat £19/month for unlimited bookings rather than per-seat pricing.

Who Calendly is genuinely better for

If you're coordinating meetings — sales calls, interviews, internal syncs — across a team, Calendly's routing forms, team pages and integrations with tools like Zoom, Slack and your CRM are doing real work that makeabook.ing doesn't attempt to replace. This isn't a "Calendly is bad" page; it's built for a different job than the one most solo service businesses have.

Who makeabook.ing is better for

Anyone booking a service rather than a meeting — nail, lash and brow artists, massage therapists and trainers, tutors, coaches, consultants, photographers — where the client needs to see what something costs and how long it takes before they commit, and where per-team-member pricing isn't a good fit.

Switching over

Moving off Calendly doesn't involve exporting anything — there's no customer account data tied to your Calendly link that needs to come with you. Recreate your services as service listings rather than event types, set your available hours, and swap the Calendly link in your bio, website or email signature for your new one. Many people run both for a short overlap period: Calendly for any existing meeting-type bookings already in the pipe, makeabook.ing for everything going forward.

FAQ

Can I show prices on Calendly the way I can on makeabook.ing?
Not natively as a structured price list — you'd typically write pricing into an event type's description, which clients may or may not read before booking. makeabook.ing shows service, duration and price together as part of the booking flow itself.

Is Calendly free to use for a small service business?
Calendly has a free tier, but it's limited in event types and features compared to its paid plans. makeabook.ing's free tier is scoped by booking volume (20/month) rather than by feature, so you get the full service-menu experience for free up to that point.

Does Calendly take a commission on bookings?
No — Calendly is a flat subscription tool, not a marketplace, so there's no commission model on either side. The real difference here isn't fees, it's whether the tool is built around meetings or around services.

Can I use Calendly for a service business if I'm careful with how I set it up?
To some extent — plenty of solo pros make it work by treating each service as its own event type and writing prices into the description. It's workable, but it puts the burden of presenting a clear service menu on you rather than the tool, which is the gap makeabook.ing is built to close.

Will switching lose me any bookings already scheduled in Calendly?
No — existing bookings in Calendly stay exactly where they are. You'd simply stop sharing the Calendly link for new bookings once your makeabook.ing link is set up, and let any already-scheduled Calendly appointments run their course.

---

If you're booking services, not meetings, you're using the wrong kind of tool. Create your free booking link and give clients a menu instead of a time slot.