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Online appointment booking for free: What's available at no cost and what to watch out for

Free online appointment booking under review: typical limits of free plans, fair criteria for making your choice, and when Pay per Use is the better option.

Free online appointment booking does exist – the honest question is where the limits lie. Free plans often cover the simplest case: one person, one appointment type, third-party branding on the booking page. That can be enough to get started; what matters is that you know the rules of the game before your appointment calendar depends on it.

What free plans typically can do – and what they can't

The patterns are similar across industries. What's usually included for free is a simple booking page with a calendar. Often limited or chargeable are:

• multiple appointment types (initial consultation, follow-up appointment, viewing …)
• team functions – multiple users, shared calendars
• your own branding instead of the provider's logo on the booking page
• integrations with calendar, CRM, or email
• reminders and workflows around the appointment

That's not a criticism – free plans are entry-level offers. It only becomes problematic if you don't realize until months later that your day-to-day work can't be mapped within the free framework and that switching costs effort.

Four criteria that matter more than price

1. Data location and GDPR: Booking data is customer data – name, contact, request. Check where the provider processes it and whether a data processing agreement is available.
2. What happens at the limit: Are bookings stopped once the free quota is exhausted? A booking link that suddenly no longer works costs trust.
3. Who owns the contact: Some free models finance themselves by showing your customers other providers' offers on the booking page. Your appointment process should lead your customers to you – and no further.
4. Switching costs: Booking links are in signatures, on business cards, on the website. Switching providers means changing all of that. Choose in a way that lets you stay for a while.

The alternative: a free account, payment based on usage

Between "free with limits" and "subscription from day one" there is a third way: Pay per Use. With webRichtung calendar, the account costs 0 euros – as do all additional user accounts for your company. There is no per-app license fee and no subscription obligation; you only pay for actual usage via a Credit balance (1 Credit = 1 euro net).

The difference from the classic free plan: calendar isn't a stripped-down standalone tool but part of a platform. You set up booking pages with public and personalized links, availabilities, and appointment types in the calendar settings – and your calendar lives where contacts, tasks, and your AI assistant are at home, too. You'll find details on setup in the documentation.

How to decide

• Do you only assign appointments occasionally? Then almost any solid tool will do – pay attention above all to GDPR and to whether the link works reliably.
• Are appointments your business? Then reliability, team capability, and the question of whether the tool grows with you are what count. A forced switch in the middle of operations is more expensive than any monthly fee.
• Do you want to stay flexible? Usage-based models avoid both: the limits of the free plan and the fixed costs of a subscription.

You can read how to approach the rollout step by step in the overview article Introducing online appointment booking.

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