Appointly

For businesses that treat every reservation as a conversation, not a checkout.

Appointly is an appointment booking system for WordPress that puts you back in the loop. Instead of automatic scheduling, customers submit booking requests — you review each one, send a personalized offer (with or without pricing), and the customer accepts or declines. Every reservation is deliberate, every price is yours to set, every customer gets a personal touch.

Perfect for photographers, consultants, event planners, freelancers, hair & beauty salons, tattoo artists, yoga and fitness studios, tutors — any service business where every reservation deserves a human in the loop.

Why Appointly?

Most booking plugins force automatic scheduling. Appointly is different:

1. Customer picks a date (or timeslot) and submits an inquiry
2. You review the request in the admin dashboard
3. You send a personalized offer with a price and personal note
4. Customer accepts or declines via a link in the email
5. Booking confirmed — everyone gets notified

This offer workflow gives you the flexibility to adjust pricing, check availability manually, and add a personal touch before confirming any reservation.

Features:

• Booking Calendar — Beautiful, responsive appointment calendar with real-time availability, day-mode single-day booking
• Unlimited Services — Create as many services as you need, with title, description, image, and base price
• Personal Offer Workflow — Review every inquiry and send customised offers with automatic email delivery and one-click Accept / Decline links
• SMTP Email Delivery — Reliable email delivery with presets for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, IONOS, Strato, World4You, Host Europe, ALL-INKL, Hetzner, and more
• Default Email Templates — Five polished HTML email templates (inquiry, admin notification, offer, confirmation, cancellation) with light and dark modes, fully translatable
• Dark Mode — Calendar automatically adapts to the visitor’s colour scheme
• Accessibility — WCAG AA compliant with keyboard navigation
• Gutenberg Block & Shortcodes — Add the calendar via block editor or shortcode
• Setup Wizard — Guided onboarding in four steps
• GDPR Ready — Consent checkbox on the booking form, personal data exporter and eraser integration, encrypted SMTP credentials
• Multilingual — Full i18n support. German translation included (de_DE, de_DE_formal, de_AT, de_CH, de_CH_informal)

Appointly Pro — coming soon:

Appointly Pro is a separate companion plugin that extends Appointly with 12 professional booking features. It is sold on https://appointly.tscholene.com for €2.99 per month and is NOT distributed through the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. The free plugin remains fully functional without Pro — Pro is an opt-in upgrade, not a lock on existing features.

Pro v1 features (launching in 2.1):

• Timeslot Scheduling — Time-based appointment slots per service. Customers pick a specific time, not just a date. Essential for yoga studios, therapists, consultants, and hair salons.
• Custom Service Fields — Build your own booking form with text, textarea, select, radio, checkbox, date, number, and file upload fields. Ask exactly what you need (“number of guests”, “venue address”, “special requests”).
• Service Addons & Upsells — Offer extras like “extra hour”, “priority scheduling”, “photo album”, or “follow-up session” with configurable pricing and quantity.
• Blocked Dates — Block individual dates globally or per service, plus recurring patterns (“block every Sunday”, “block December 20 – January 3”).
• Multi-day Bookings — Date range bookings for multi-day events, workshops, retreats, and courses.
• iCal Feed — Subscribe to your bookings in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook for seamless two-way sync.
• Recurring Bookings — Automatic re-booking for weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly sessions. Ideal for yoga teachers, therapists, and consultants running regular appointments.
• Group Bookings — Multiple seats per time slot for classes, workshops, and small-group events.
• Customer Self-Service Portal — Customers reschedule or cancel their bookings via a secure email link, no admin contact required.
• Automatic Booking Reminders — Polite, on-brand reminder emails sent 24 hours before each appointment.
• Cancellation Policies — Rule-based fees and cutoff times (“cancellations under 24h incur a 50% fee”) enforced automatically.
• Custom Email Template Editor — Live preview editor with version history for all six email templates.

Coming in 2.2–2.5:

• Staff scheduling with per-staff calendars and load balancing
• Deposit collection via Stripe (your own Stripe keys, no middleman)
• WooCommerce integration with product-based bookings
• Advanced analytics with revenue reports and conversion funnels
• Zapier and webhook integrations for workflow automation
• Custom branding with logo and colours for your calendar and emails
• CSV and Excel export for accounting
• Priority email support

Learn more and join the waitlist at https://appointly.tscholene.com

Shortcodes & Block:

• Gutenberg Block: Search “Booking Calendar” in the block editor
• [appointly_calendar] — Display the booking calendar
• [appointly_calendar service="2"] — Calendar for a specific service
• [appointly_form service="2"] — Standalone booking form

External services

Appointly loads Google Fonts on the WordPress admin pages so the admin UI can render with the Appointly brand typography (Instrument Serif for hero headings, Plus Jakarta Sans for body text, DM Mono for data labels). This is the only external service that the free plugin connects to.

• Service: Google Fonts (https://fonts.google.com)
• Purpose: Loading three web font families so the admin SPA renders with the Appointly brand typography
• Data sent: Your browser’s IP address and User-Agent are sent to fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com when an admin user opens any Appointly admin page. No booking, customer, or plugin-specific data is transmitted.
• When: Only when an authenticated WordPress administrator opens an Appointly admin page. Fonts are never loaded on customer-facing booking pages, iCal feed requests, or REST API calls.
• Terms of use: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users
• Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

If you prefer to block Google Fonts entirely (for example in a privacy-hardened admin environment), the admin UI degrades gracefully to a system font stack (system-ui / BlinkMacSystemFont / Segoe UI / ui-serif / Menlo) and remains fully functional.

No other external services are contacted by the free plugin. Appointly does not call any payment providers (Stripe, PayPal), analytics services, license servers, or telemetry endpoints.

Appointly Pro — the separate companion plugin sold on https://appointly.tscholene.com — will, when installed, connect to appointly.tscholene.com for license validation (once per day) and plugin update checks. That connection is a feature of the Pro plugin and does not affect this free plugin. Appointly Pro ships with its own readme, privacy disclosures, and external-services documentation. The free plugin on this page does not make any requests to appointly.tscholene.com at runtime.

Build Instructions

The admin dashboard and the Gutenberg block are built with @wordpress/scripts (webpack). The uncompiled source is included in this distribution:

• Admin React source: admin/src/ (entry point: admin/src/index.js)
• Block source: blocks/src/ (entry point: blocks/src/index.js)

To rebuild from source:

cd admin && npm install && npm run build
cd blocks && npm install && npm run build

Output goes to admin/build/ and blocks/build/ respectively.

The public frontend calendar (public/js/appointly-calendar.js) and stylesheet (public/css/appointly-calendar.css) are not compiled — they are vanilla JavaScript and CSS, human-readable as-is.