# Cronofy

> Cronofy is a scheduling API and calendar synchronisation platform that lets software companies embed real-time availability, two-way calendar sync, and booking into their own products across Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Apple, and other calendar services, alongside a separate Scheduler product for teams; the developer API is published from around $139 a month for the entry plan with a free developer account for building and testing, and the higher API tiers run to $819 and $2,399 a month by synced-account volume.

- Category: Scheduling & Booking (https://saastracker.org/categories/scheduling)
- Website: https://www.cronofy.com
- Starting price: Free developer account, then around $139 per month for the entry API plan
- Free plan: A free developer account for building and testing, rather than a free production tier. Live usage requires a paid plan.
- Free trial: A free developer account allows building and testing against the APIs before any payment
- Founded: 2014, HQ: Nottingham, United Kingdom, Ownership: Venture and growth-capital backed
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/cronofy

## Overview

Cronofy is the odd one out in this category, and deliberately so. Every other product here sells a finished booking experience to a person. Cronofy sells the plumbing underneath one to a company that is building its own. If you run an applicant tracking system, a field service platform, a telehealth product, or a marketplace where two parties have to find a time, Cronofy is how you avoid writing your own Exchange integration and then maintaining it forever.

The technical problem it solves is genuinely hard and genuinely unglamorous. Calendar systems disagree about recurrence, timezones, free-busy semantics, and permissions, and each of Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, on-premise Exchange, Apple Calendar, and CalDAV has its own failure modes. Cronofy normalises all of that behind one API, handles the OAuth and token refresh, keeps availability in sync in real time, and reports that it schedules hundreds of millions of events across more than 180,000 organisations.

There are two commercial products. The API for Developers is the core: pricing published in tiers, with a free developer account for building and testing, an entry Starter plan around $139 a month, Emerging at roughly $819 a month billed annually for up to 1,000 synced accounts and 2,000 smart invites, and Growth at roughly $2,399 for up to 6,000 synced accounts, with per-unit overages beyond each allowance. The separate Scheduler product is a team scheduling tool priced around £12 per assigned seat per month, with Scheduler API access starting at a much higher Business tier.

For a small business, the honest framing is this: Cronofy is a self-serve, published-price product with a free developer tier, and a small SaaS company can absolutely sign up and start building without a sales call. But at $139 a month for the entry API plan it is priced as infrastructure, not as an office tool, and the Scheduler side's API access only appears at £589 a month. If you want people to book time with you, this is the wrong purchase by an order of magnitude. If you are shipping scheduling inside software you sell, it is one of very few credible options.

## How it works

1. A developer creates a free Cronofy developer account, registers an application, and receives a client ID and secret. From there the APIs can be queried immediately against test accounts before any money changes hands, which is the correct way to evaluate infrastructure.

2. Your users connect their calendars through Cronofy's hosted authorisation flow, which handles OAuth for Google and Microsoft, credential-based connection for Exchange, and CalDAV for the rest. Cronofy stores and refreshes the tokens so your application never handles calendar credentials directly.

3. Your product then queries availability rather than raw calendar data. The availability endpoints take participants, required durations, buffers, and constraints, and return bookable slots computed across every connected calendar in real time. This is the part that would otherwise consume months of engineering: the difference between reading events and correctly answering when can these five people all meet for 45 minutes next week.

4. Once a time is chosen, Cronofy writes the event, sends Smart Invites that appear as proper calendar invitations with RSVP tracking, and pushes real-time notifications back to your application when anything changes. An Embedded Scheduler component and, more recently, usage-priced Meeting Agents extend the surface for teams who want a ready-made front end rather than building one.

## Best for

Software companies embedding scheduling inside their own product (recruiting platforms, field service software, telehealth, marketplaces, sales tools) who need reliable multi-provider calendar sync and real-time availability without building and maintaining it themselves.

## Not the right fit for

- Anyone who just wants a booking link; at $139 a month for the entry API plan this is infrastructure pricing and Koalendar, SimplyMeet.me, or Cal.com will do the job for under $10 a seat.
- Service businesses with staff, rooms, and a till, which is not remotely what Cronofy is for and never will be.
- Small teams wanting the Scheduler product with API access, since that combination begins at a Business tier around £589 a month covering up to 50 seats.
- Companies who need scheduling working next week with no engineering resource; this is a developer product and someone has to write code against it.
- Budget-constrained startups whose calendar integration needs are limited to Google, where the direct Google Calendar API is free and adequate until Microsoft and Exchange customers arrive.

## Features

### Calendar synchronisation

The hard part, normalised behind one interface.

- **Multi-provider calendar sync**: Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, on-premise Exchange, Apple Calendar, and CalDAV services behind a single API, so your product does not carry five integrations and five sets of edge cases.
- **Two-way real-time sync**: Changes flow in both directions and propagate in real time rather than on a polling schedule, which is what keeps availability trustworthy at the moment a user is looking at it.
- **Token and authorisation management**: Cronofy runs the OAuth flows and refreshes tokens, so your application never stores calendar credentials and never has to handle provider-specific auth expiry.
- **Free-busy normalisation**: Provider-specific differences in how busy time, tentative events, recurrence, and all-day events are represented are reconciled into one consistent model.
- **Push notifications**: Your application is notified when a connected calendar changes, rather than having to poll for differences.
- **Application calendars**: Calendars created and owned by your application rather than by an end user, for cases where the schedule belongs to the product itself.

### Availability and scheduling

The endpoints that answer the actual question.

- **Real-time availability queries**: Ask for bookable slots given participants, durations, buffers, and constraints, and receive answers computed live across every connected calendar. This is the core value and the thing most expensive to build in-house.
- **Multi-participant scheduling**: Compute times when several required and optional participants are simultaneously free, which is where naive implementations fall apart first.
- **Sequenced scheduling**: Chain dependent slots together, such as a multi-stage interview loop where each stage must follow the previous one with the right people in each.
- **Smart Invites**: Calendar invitations delivered as genuine invites with RSVP tracking, sent to participants who have not connected a calendar to your product at all. Allowances are included per plan with overage pricing beyond.
- **Buffers, constraints, and working hours**: Availability rules expressed per participant, so the API respects real working patterns rather than raw calendar gaps.
- **Meeting rooms and enterprise connectivity**: Meeting room resources and enterprise connectivity features appear on the higher API tiers, for products selling into organisations with managed room systems.

### Ready-made front ends

For teams who want less to build.

- **Embedded Scheduler**: A drop-in scheduling component for your product's own UI, priced per seat as an allowance within the API plans with per-seat overages beyond it.
- **Cronofy Scheduler**: A standalone team scheduling product priced around £12 per assigned seat per month, with dynamic seat assignment so you pay only for seats actively used in the month.
- **Meeting Agents**: A newer usage-priced capability starting at around $0.79 per hour with the first 24 hours free, tiered discounts at volume, and a $99 minimum monthly commitment.
- **Scheduler API access**: API access to the Scheduler product begins at the Business tier, published at around £589 a month billed annually covering up to 50 assigned seats, with Enterprise at around £2,279 covering up to 200.

### Developer experience

What it is actually like to build against.

- **Free developer account**: Register an application, get a client ID and secret, and query the APIs before paying anything. This is the right way to evaluate infrastructure and not every vendor in this space offers it.
- **Unlimited API calls**: Plans are metered on synced accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats rather than on request volume, so efficient or chatty implementations cost the same.
- **Comprehensive documentation**: Full API reference and developer guides at docs.cronofy.com covering authorisation, availability, events, notifications, and plan limits.
- **Predictable overage pricing**: Published per-unit overages (roughly $0.35 to $0.69 per synced account per month depending on tier, $0.06 per 10 Smart Invites, and $1.75 to $3.45 per Embedded Scheduler seat) so growth beyond an allowance is modelled rather than negotiated.
- **Enterprise-grade compliance posture**: Cronofy sells to companies who then sell to enterprises, so the security and compliance documentation is oriented to surviving a customer's procurement review rather than a small business's curiosity.

## Use cases

- **Applicant tracking system with enterprise customers**: Recruiters need to schedule multi-stage interview loops across panels whose calendars live in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and on-premise Exchange depending on the customer. Outcome: One integration covers every provider, sequenced scheduling handles the dependent stages, and the engineering team never writes an Exchange connector.
- **Field service platform booking engineer visits**: Availability must reflect each engineer's real calendar in real time, and a slot offered to a customer must still be there when they accept it. Outcome: Real-time availability queries with buffers and working hours per engineer, plus push notifications when a calendar changes, so the booking flow does not offer stale slots.
- **Telehealth product connecting patients to clinicians**: Clinicians keep personal calendars the platform does not control, and double-booking a consultation is a clinical and commercial problem. Outcome: Two-way sync keeps the platform's view of clinician availability accurate, Smart Invites deliver proper calendar invitations to patients who have connected nothing, and the platform never stores calendar credentials.
- **Marketplace matching two-sided supply and demand**: Both sides need to be free simultaneously, and neither side is willing to hand over calendar access to a startup they have never heard of. Outcome: Cronofy's hosted authorisation flow handles the connection, multi-participant availability computes the intersection, and the trust question moves to a vendor that already holds the compliance documentation.

## Pricing

Two separate products. The developer API is priced in tiers by synced accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats, with published per-unit overages and unlimited API calls. The Scheduler team product is priced per dynamically assigned seat, with Scheduler API access only from a much higher tier.

- **Developer account**: $0 for building and testing. Register an application and obtain a client ID and secret; Query the full API surface; Full documentation access; No sales conversation required. The correct way to evaluate this product. Build against it first, decide later.
- **Starter (API)**: About $139 per month. Entry production tier for the developer API; Unlimited API calls; Multi-provider calendar sync; Real-time availability queries; Smart Invites allowance. The lowest published price at which you can put Cronofy into production.
- **Emerging (API)**: About $819 per month, billed annually. Up to 1,000 synced accounts; 2,000 Smart Invites; Unlimited API calls; Overages at roughly $0.69 per synced account and $0.06 per 10 Smart Invites; Embedded Scheduler seats included with per-seat overage.
- **Growth (API)**: About $2,399 per month, billed annually. Up to 6,000 synced accounts; Everything in Emerging; Enterprise connectivity; Meeting room support; Lower per-unit overage rates.
- **Scheduler (team product)**: About £12 per assigned seat per month. Standalone team scheduling product; Dynamic seat assignment: you pay only for seats actively used in the month; No Scheduler API access on this tier; Scheduler API begins at a Business tier around £589 per month for up to 50 seats; Enterprise around £2,279 per month for up to 200 seats. A separate purchase from the developer API, and the tier where API access appears is a large jump.

Add-ons:

- Synced account overage (About $0.35 to $0.69 per account per month depending on tier)
- Smart Invite overage (About $0.06 per 10 invites per month)
- Embedded Scheduler seat overage (About $1.75 to $3.45 per seat per month depending on tier)
- Meeting Agents (From about $0.79 per hour with the first 24 hours free and a $99 minimum monthly commitment): Usage-priced with tiered discounts at volume.

Billing notes:

- The API tiers are billed annually at the published rates, so the $819 and $2,399 figures represent a substantial annual commitment rather than a month-to-month subscription.
- API calls are unlimited on every tier. The meters are synced accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats, which means the cost model tracks your customer count rather than your traffic.
- Overage pricing is published per unit rather than negotiated, so growth beyond an allowance can be modelled in advance, which is unusual and welcome in developer infrastructure.
- Scheduler seats are dynamically assigned and charged only when actively used in a month, so a team with irregular scheduling patterns does not pay for idle seats.
- Scheduler API access is a large jump: the Team tier at around £12 per seat has none, and it begins at Business around £589 a month for up to 50 seats.
- Meeting Agents carry a $99 minimum monthly commitment on top of their hourly usage pricing.

Value assessment: Judged against building it yourself, Cronofy is straightforwardly cheap. A competent engineer will spend months getting Exchange, Google, and Microsoft 365 availability correct, and will then spend years maintaining it as providers change behaviour. Starter at around $139 a month is less than a week of that engineer's time per year. Judged against other products in this category, it is expensive by a factor of twenty, because it is not competing with them: nobody chooses between Cronofy and Koalendar. The honest caution is the shape of the curve. The jump from $139 to $819 is steep, the Scheduler API jump from £12 per seat to £589 a month is steeper, and a startup should model synced-account growth carefully before committing annually. Get the free developer account, build the integration, and let real usage tell you which tier you belong on.

## Strengths

- Solves a genuinely hard engineering problem: multi-provider calendar sync and real-time availability across Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Apple, and CalDAV behind one API.
- A free developer account with full API access for building and testing before paying, which is the correct evaluation path for infrastructure and not universal.
- Unlimited API calls on every tier, so the cost model tracks customers rather than traffic and chatty implementations are not punished.
- Published per-unit overage pricing rather than negotiated terms, so growth beyond an allowance can be forecast rather than discovered.
- Sequenced scheduling and multi-participant availability handle the cases (interview loops, panel scheduling) that naive implementations get wrong.
- Your application never holds calendar credentials, which removes a substantial security and compliance burden from your own product.
- Established and funded: founded in Nottingham in 2014 by Adam Bird and Garry Shutler, with a £15M investment from BGF, and used by more than 180,000 organisations.
- Smart Invites deliver real calendar invitations with RSVP tracking to participants who have connected nothing, which most homegrown implementations never manage.

## Limitations

- It is developer infrastructure, so nothing works until someone writes code. There is no path from signup to a working booking page in an afternoon.
- Entry pricing at around $139 a month makes it categorically unsuitable for anyone who just wants a scheduling link, where sub-$10 products do the same visible job.
- The tier jumps are steep: $139 to $819 to $2,399 on the API, and £12 per seat to £589 a month for Scheduler API access, with the higher tiers billed annually.
- The Scheduler product is a separate purchase from the API, which makes the overall pricing story more confusing than it needs to be.
- Meeting Agents carry a $99 minimum monthly commitment on top of usage pricing, so experimenting with them is not free.
- For a product that only ever needs Google Calendar, the direct Google API is free and sufficient, and Cronofy's value only appears when Microsoft and Exchange customers arrive.
- Public pricing detail varies by region and product line, and the two published pricing pages (Scheduler and API) do not always present cleanly together, so a buyer often ends up confirming figures directly.

## Comparisons

- **Cronofy vs Cal.com**: The closest genuine alternative. Cal.com is open source, self-hostable, and offers both a finished scheduling product and a platform API for embedding scheduling in your own software, with pricing that starts far lower and a codebase you can inspect and run yourself. Cronofy is closed but deeper on calendar synchronisation, particularly on-premise Exchange and enterprise connectivity. Choose Cal.com if you want control, open source, and a cheaper entry point; choose Cronofy if your customers run Exchange and calendar sync correctness is the thing that will break your product.
- **Cronofy vs Calendly**: Different layers of the same stack. Calendly sells a finished booking experience with an API attached, from $10 to $16 a seat, with an Enterprise tier starting at $15,000 a year and a 50-seat minimum. Cronofy sells the scheduling layer you build your own experience on. If your users should see your brand and your booking flow, Cronofy is the answer. If they should see a booking link and you do not care whose, Calendly is cheaper and finished.
- **Cronofy vs OnceHub**: OnceHub is a finished scheduling and lead-routing product for teams, with booking pages, routing rules, and CRM integration, priced per seat. Cronofy is infrastructure. A team wanting inbound routing without engineering should buy OnceHub. A company that needs scheduling to appear inside software it sells to its own customers should buy Cronofy, because OnceHub is not designed to be white-labelled into someone else's product.
- **Cronofy vs Koalendar**: Not competitors in any real sense, and worth stating plainly to avoid a bad purchase. Koalendar is a $6.99 per seat booking link for a person who wants others to book time. Cronofy starts at around $139 a month for a developer API. If you are choosing between them, you have misdiagnosed your problem: one of the two is obviously right and it is almost always Koalendar.
- **Cronofy vs SimplyMeet.me**: SimplyMeet.me offers a developer API on paid plans from $5.99 a user, which sounds superficially like the same category. It is not: that API reads and writes against SimplyMeet.me's own booking product, while Cronofy is a calendar synchronisation platform your product builds on top of, covering Exchange and enterprise connectivity SimplyMeet.me never touches. Take SimplyMeet.me to automate around your own bookings; take Cronofy to put scheduling inside software you ship to customers.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Hours to first API call with a free developer account, days to weeks for a production integration. The variable is how much scheduling logic your own product needs to express, not how hard Cronofy is to call.
- Learning curve: Moderate for a developer, impossible for a non-developer. The API concepts (synced accounts, availability rules, participants, Smart Invites, application calendars) are clean once understood, but they are calendar-domain concepts and there is real domain complexity underneath.
- Onboarding: Self-serve throughout the lower tiers: create a free developer account, build, and pick a plan when you go live. The higher Growth and Strategic tiers involve integration consultancy and priority support, and the Strategic tier is quoted rather than published.
- Migration: Migrating from a homegrown calendar integration means re-authorising every connected user, since calendar OAuth tokens are provider-issued and cannot be handed over. Plan a period of running both paths in parallel and prompting users to reconnect. Migrating away from Cronofy carries the same cost in reverse, which is the real lock-in here: the data is not the problem, the re-authorisation of every end user is.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: REST API, Official SDKs and client libraries, Embedded Scheduler UI component, Cronofy Scheduler web product
- API: The product is the API. Unlimited API calls on all plans, with metering on synced accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats. Covers calendar read and write, real-time availability, multi-participant and sequenced scheduling, push notifications, application calendars, and meeting rooms on higher tiers.
- Compliance: GDPR, Enterprise-oriented security documentation, since Cronofy's customers must survive their own customers' procurement reviews
- Data residency: Regional hosting options are part of the enterprise conversation; Cronofy is UK-headquartered with international operations.
- SSO: Relevant to the Scheduler product and enterprise arrangements; the API product authenticates applications by client credentials and end users by OAuth.
- Security notes: Cronofy holds and refreshes calendar OAuth tokens so your application never stores end-user calendar credentials, which is a significant reduction in your own attack surface and compliance scope. Because Cronofy sells into companies that sell into enterprises, its security posture is built to be inspected by third parties rather than merely asserted.

## Support

- Channels: Developer support, Priority support on the Strategic tier, Integration consultancy on higher tiers, Sales contact for Strategic and enterprise arrangements
- Documentation: Extensive developer documentation at docs.cronofy.com covering the full API reference, authorisation, availability, notifications, and published plan limits.
- Community: Developer-oriented rather than a consumer community; the audience is engineering teams integrating the API rather than end users.

## Company

- Founded: 2014
- Founders: Adam Bird, Garry Shutler
- Headquarters: Nottingham, United Kingdom
- Ownership: Venture and growth-capital backed
- Employees: Not publicly disclosed; a mid-sized private company
- Funding: Includes a £15M investment from BGF (Business Growth Fund), with the platform reported to be used by more than 180,000 organisations and scheduling hundreds of millions of events.

Funding history:

- Growth investment (2021): £15M. Led by BGF, funding expansion of the scheduling API platform.

Timeline:

- 2014: Founded in Nottingham by Adam Bird and Garry Shutler to solve multi-provider calendar synchronisation as a service rather than as an in-house problem for every company.
- 2017: Availability and scheduling APIs mature beyond raw calendar sync, moving the product from calendar plumbing to a scheduling platform.
- 2019: Smart Invites ship, allowing calendar invitations with RSVP tracking to be sent to participants who have connected no calendar at all.
- 2021: Raises a £15M growth investment from BGF, and the Embedded Scheduler component gives customers a ready-made front end.
- 2024: Cronofy Scheduler launches as a standalone team scheduling product with dynamically assigned seats, alongside the developer API.
- 2026: Meeting Agents arrive as a usage-priced capability from around $0.79 per hour, with API plans published from around $139 a month and the platform reported at more than 180,000 organisations.

## Integrations

Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, On-premise Microsoft Exchange, Apple Calendar (iCloud), CalDAV services, Meeting room and resource systems on higher tiers, Embedded Scheduler UI component, Official SDKs and client libraries, Real-time push notifications and webhooks

## FAQ

### What is Cronofy?

Cronofy is a scheduling API and calendar synchronisation platform. It lets software companies embed real-time availability, two-way calendar sync, and booking inside their own products across Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, on-premise Exchange, Apple Calendar, and CalDAV. It also sells a separate team scheduling product called Cronofy Scheduler.

### How much does Cronofy cost?

There is a free developer account for building and testing. The production API tiers are published at around $139 a month for Starter, roughly $819 a month billed annually for Emerging (up to 1,000 synced accounts and 2,000 Smart Invites), and roughly $2,399 for Growth (up to 6,000 synced accounts), with a quoted Strategic tier above that. The separate Scheduler product is around £12 per assigned seat per month.

### Is Cronofy a booking link like Calendly?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. Calendly sells a finished booking page to a person. Cronofy sells the scheduling layer a company builds its own booking experience on top of. If you want people to book time with you, Cronofy is the wrong product and a $7 to $16 per seat tool is the right one.

### Can I try Cronofy without talking to sales?

Yes. You can create a free developer account, register an application, obtain a client ID and secret, and query the full API against test accounts before paying anything. That is the correct way to evaluate it. Only the highest Strategic tier and enterprise arrangements involve a required sales conversation.

### What does Cronofy meter, and are API calls limited?

API calls are unlimited on every plan. What is metered is synced calendar accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats, with published per-unit overages of roughly $0.35 to $0.69 per synced account per month, $0.06 per 10 Smart Invites, and $1.75 to $3.45 per Embedded Scheduler seat. That means your cost tracks your customer count rather than your traffic.

### Why not just use the Google Calendar API directly?

If every one of your users is on Google and always will be, you probably should. Cronofy's value appears the moment you have a customer on Microsoft 365, a customer on on-premise Exchange, and a customer on iCloud, at which point you are maintaining three integrations with three sets of quirks around recurrence, timezones, free-busy semantics, and token expiry. Cronofy normalises all of that behind one interface.

### What is sequenced scheduling?

The ability to chain dependent slots together, such as an interview loop where a screen must be followed by a panel and then a final round, each with different required participants and each constrained by what came before. It is the case naive scheduling implementations get wrong, and it is a headline reason recruiting platforms buy Cronofy specifically.

### Does my application ever hold calendar credentials?

No. Cronofy runs the OAuth flows and holds and refreshes the tokens, so your product never stores end-user calendar credentials. That materially reduces your own attack surface and compliance scope, which matters when your customers put you through a security review.

### What is the difference between the Cronofy API and Cronofy Scheduler?

The API is infrastructure you build on, priced by synced accounts from around $139 a month. Scheduler is a finished team scheduling product priced around £12 per assigned seat, with seats charged only when actively used in a month. They are separate purchases, and Scheduler API access is a large jump, beginning at a Business tier around £589 a month covering up to 50 seats.

### How hard is it to move off Cronofy later?

The data is not the problem. The lock-in is that calendar OAuth tokens are provider-issued and cannot be transferred, so leaving means prompting every connected end user to reconnect their calendar to whatever replaces it. Plan for a parallel-running period in either direction, and treat that re-authorisation burden as the real switching cost rather than any export process.

## Editorial verdict

Cronofy is the only product in this category that is not competing with the others, and buying it by mistake would be an expensive error. It is calendar and scheduling infrastructure for software companies: one API across Google, Microsoft 365, on-premise Exchange, Apple, and CalDAV, with real-time availability, multi-participant and sequenced scheduling, and Smart Invites, backed by a free developer account and published per-unit overages. If you ship a product where two parties need to find a time, that is a genuinely hard problem you should not solve yourself, and around $139 a month for the entry tier is less than a week of engineering. The cautions are the steep tier jumps ($139 to $819 to $2,399, all annual above Starter), the confusing separation between the API and the Scheduler product, and the fact that a Google-only product does not need any of it yet. Build against the free developer account first. And if what you actually wanted was a link people could click to book a call, close this page and read the Koalendar or SimplyMeet.me profile instead.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology