Notion Calendar is out: David vs Goliath

February 2024

It was just another normal day of work when I connected to Notion to receive a notification about a new feature: the notion calendar. I started looking through their press-release, and it mostly looked like integration with their existing calendar roadmap, as well as booking links.

I was quite happy at this point, looks like I can make a great little post about it, hopefully take part of the buzz created by it.

Then it all took a turn for the worst

I realized they also added cross-account event synchronization, which is our main value proposition. On top of that, they offer the service for free!

That hurt, quite a lot. I immediately started spiralling, thinking I might as well close down the shop. Then I realized it didn't need to be the case.

Just like plausible.io managed to fight against Google analytics, I thought I could fight against Notion.

Open source

Calensync is entirely open-source. What we provide is simply the hosting as well as support. I believe open-source is fundamental, which is why I've decided to do it for Calensync. We are fully transparent about our code, our progress, and limits, but I believe this transparency gets me closer to my users, and creates trust-based relationship.

On top of that, open-source allows users to easily see what exactly we keep about their data, and how it's used (hint: we only keep the strict minimum).

..about your data

You may care or you may not care (you really should), but one thing for certain, it is never good if giants own all your data. As the saying goes: "if something is free, then you're the product". Whatver they tell you about the data they keep, as a closed-source solution, you should never accept it at face value.

PERMISSIONS

Of course, I wanted to try this Notion Calendar, see what it's all about. Went through the process, connect Google account, and then.. that's a lot of permissionsy they're asking for!

Not only is it a lot of permissions, they're also wide-ranging ones. For example, you can have read-only permissions, or write-only, but they decided to go with the equivalent of admin permissions on your calendars.

I was quite unhappy I couldn't go with more granular permissions, and had to add delete events permission (even though I would've liked to have only delete events that I creaded), but Notion just decided to go and drop a nuke.

There's a hope

Despite going against Goliath, I still believe there's a hope. I've seen these fights in the past, and I've seen David win multiple times, so I'm hopeful we'll be able to take it. What we offer is simpler, but at the same time completely transparent, and we really listen to the feedback of our users to improve the platform.

Anyway, we don't have much choice, so let's give it a try!