Drry vs Cal.com
A warmer home for your community, without the cut.
Cal.com is the open-source scheduler, and its free plan is one of the most generous in the category: unlimited event types for one person, payments at booking, and a hundred-plus integrations, with the option to host it yourself. It is scheduling infrastructure, and it is very good at it. Drry is a community platform with booking built in: the session lands on the calendar your classes run on, the client becomes someone in your community, and the call can happen in a room of your own.
Drry vs Cal.com, the full picture
| Drry | Cal.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | A genuine free plan for one person, with unlimited event types and calendars, which is more generous than most schedulers. Teams pay per user. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | No cut from Cal.com that we can find: payments go through your own Stripe or PayPal, the Stripe app is listed as free, and only processing fees apply. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Not a community or course platform: Cal.com is scheduling infrastructure, so the courses and the community your clients belong to live elsewhere. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Outside what a scheduler does. A step-by-step how-to or a recipe would live wherever the rest of your content does. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Booking pages and routing forms rather than landing pages: the page that sells the call, and any funnel reporting around it, come from another tool. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Your booking page sits at a cal.com link, with removing Cal.com branding on its Teams plan and a company subdomain on Organizations. Because it is open source, you can also host it yourself on a domain of your own. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Booking analytics on its Teams plan, describing meetings: what was booked, cancelled and when. How a client is doing after the call is a question for wherever they went next. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Free for one person, then per-user monthly pricing for teams and custom pricing for enterprise. It is a price for scheduling alone. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time link on any plan including free, or an installment plan with an agreement they sign before they pay from $29/mo, built in, 0% platform fee on all of it. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Stripe and PayPal payments at booking on the free plan, which Calendly keeps for paid plans. An installment plan, or an agreement signed before the checkout, is left to other tools. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, with new-content emails to members counted separately on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email and SMS notifications to the people who book, customisable through workflows on its team plans. A broadcast or newsletter to your whole audience is a separate email tool's job. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and $500 of sales a month, both unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it at every level, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | It sells meetings, not files: a download or a digital product is sold somewhere else. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Outside what a scheduler does: an audio library or a private podcast feed would live in another tool. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (1 session type on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | One of the strongest answers here, and the most generous free one: unlimited event types for one person, a check against your connected calendars, over a hundred integrations, and on Teams round robin, collective and managed event types, and routing forms. Drry reads only its own calendar and has no round robin, so for a team routing leads between people Cal.com is the better tool. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | A scheduler rather than a place people talk: messages with a client happen in email or a chat app, and clients never meet each other there. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | It records bookings and the payments taken at them. A lifetime revenue figure per client, across everything they have paid you, is not what it is built to track. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Nothing to drip: without courses, releasing lessons on a schedule, prerequisites and quizzes do not come up. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | Its plans are priced per user for the people taking bookings. It sells meetings individually rather than membership levels to clients. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Captioning lessons or audio for members is outside a scheduler, since it hosts no member media for anyone to caption. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Nothing to moderate: it takes bookings, and clients never post anything to it. |
| Tracking your own ads | Connect your own Meta, Google and TikTok pixels on Growth ($99/mo): your ad accounts, your audiences, no cut of what the ads earn and nothing routed through us. Meta and TikTok conversions are sent from our servers off the Stripe payment we already verified, so an ad blocker does not cost you the sale and the value reported is the amount actually charged, not a list price on a page. Google fires in the browser with a conversion label you set per goal, because Google Ads has no server endpoint anyone can use without its own API. Refunds and lost chargebacks are reported back as reversals, so you can see which campaigns bring refund-prone buyers and exclude them from the audiences your ads chase. And the pixels load on your PUBLIC pages only, never in the community feed, a lesson, a direct message or your console, which is enforced by a test rather than a promise. The EU/UK consent banner and the record of who agreed to what are built in, not a second tool you buy. | Its app store has a Meta pixel, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for the booking page, which covers the booking step well. What happens after the booking, a membership or a purchase, is tracked wherever that sale happens. |
| Live calls, webinars and a calendar | A calendar built in and free on every plan including free: in-person meetups, events elsewhere, and online sessions on a link you paste, with RSVPs, invites, reminders and a feed that syncs to your own calendar. From Creator a class, a group call or a booked session can run in your own branded video room on your own address instead of on a pasted Zoom link, with up to 25 people in a meeting (100 on Growth), recorded when you press record, and 20 participant hours included each month (50 on Growth). Growth adds webinars, a stage of up to 5 presenters broadcasting to a watch-only audience with 150 viewer hours included, and AI meeting notes: a transcript and a written recap after the call, with no bot joining the room. Recording, chat and transcription draw no hours, and nothing bills past an allowance unless you switch extra usage on and set the cap yourself. | Cal Video is included, so a booking can run in Cal.com's own video room, and Zoom, Google Meet and Teams connect too. For a one-to-one that is a real peer to a Drry room; what it does not give you is a calendar of group classes and webinars your members already use. |
Details reflect each platform's publicly stated model and can change. Check current terms before deciding.
Moving off Cal.com is easier than staying.
Keep your margin
On Drry, every member payment stays yours on every plan, including free. 0% platform cut; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.
One tool, not five
Courses, community, payments, and funnels in one place, your brand on all of it. No bolt-on page builders or separate apps.
You own the rails
Your own Stripe account and member list. Leaving never means starting over, because your customers were always yours.
Why creators pick Drry
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $99 a month (as checked June 2026) for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time link on any plan including free, or an installment plan with an agreement they sign before paying from $29/mo. Built in, and no platform fee on any of it. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (1 session type on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Run ads to your own funnels and see what they actually bring in. On Growth you connect your OWN Meta, Google and TikTok pixels, in your own ad accounts, and the sales come back attributed: leads, bookings and purchases, with Meta and TikTok reported from our server off the signed Stripe payment rather than from a browser an ad blocker can switch off. It fires on your public pages only, never inside the community, never in your console, and never on a form you have embedded on somebody else's site. Visitors in the EU and UK are asked first, and nothing loads until they agree. We take 0% of what those ads earn you.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
- Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
- Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.
- Run your webinars where your members already are, on Growth: a stage of up to 5 presenters broadcasting to a watch-only audience that can run into the thousands, on your own address and in your own brand, with the registration page, the reminder emails, the live chat, the recording and the replay all part of the same event. Somebody watching can raise a hand and be brought up to speak. The people watching draw a viewer allowance of their own, so the part that grows with a good turnout is metered separately from everything else you run; your presenters draw the same participant hours any Drry room draws. Recording, chat and transcription count against neither, and nothing bills past either allowance unless you switch metered hours on yourself and set the ceiling. Sell seats through your own Stripe and we take 0% of the ticket. Below Growth the option is shown locked with what it would give you rather than hidden, so you are never guessing what you are buying.
- Live sessions are native, not a Zoom link to paste. The calendar is free on every plan, and from Creator every class, group call and booked session can run in your own branded room on your own address, with 20 participant hours included each month and a recording when you press record. The booking page, the invite, the reminders and the room are one flow, so a client who picks a time can land straight in your own room. On Growth you get webinars with 150 viewer hours of their own, and AI meeting notes that leave a transcript and a written recap after any call you switch them on for, with no bot in the room.
Drry vs Cal.com, questions
Cal.com vs Calendly: which is better?
For one person on a budget, Cal.com, because its free plan gives you unlimited event types and payments at booking, which Calendly keeps for paid plans. Calendly is the more familiar link and has a longer track record with sales teams, and both do round robin and routing on their team plans. Neither is a community platform: if your clients also take your courses or join your group, a booking page inside that community is the other option, which is what Drry is.
What is the best Cal.com alternative for a coach?
If your booked calls lead into a paid community or a course, Drry: the booking page is included on every plan (1 session type on free, unlimited from Creator at $29/mo), paid sessions go through your own Stripe at 0% platform fee, and the client lands in the same place as the rest of your coaching. If you only need scheduling, Cal.com and Calendly are both strong, and our guide to Calendly alternatives compares them with dated prices.
What does Cal.com do better than Drry?
Scheduling breadth. Cal.com reads your Google or Outlook calendar before offering a time, connects to over a hundred apps, rotates calls across a team, and can be self-hosted. Drry blocks against its own calendar only, has no round robin, and books one person into one session at a time. If scheduling is the whole job, Cal.com is the better tool.
Does Drry charge a fee on paid bookings?
No. A paid session goes through your own connected Stripe account and Drry takes 0% on every plan, including free, where a paid session sells as a product and so shares the free plan's $500 a month sales ceiling. Only Stripe's processing fee applies.
Compare Drry to other platforms
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