Kin.today Blog

Kin.today is the independent calendar you’ve been waiting for.

What do we offer?

Kin.today provides you with the perfect seamless calendar experience you’ve always needed: the Kin calendar core hosted on an incredible infrastructure.

You don’t need to worry about anything, we’ve got you covered. Just relax, check your Kin and focus on living your life.

How much does it cost?

Kin.today costs 2€ per month.
If you go for a year, it’s only 20€.

It’s that simple.

No hidden cost, no additional cost per platform or new features, no other fees.

Why do we do it?

Because we value transparency, quality and trust.

We could have continued a long beta or raised money without any business plan, but it didn’t feel right: at some point it would have meant compromises that we didn’t want to make.

We prefer to start a healthy sustainable business at a fair price as early as possible.

What’s next?

February and March are on us so that you can try Kin.today and enjoy it as much as you want (though we still have a huge waitlist, we’ll release more invites every week). Then we’ll move on to the paid subscription model.

Other types of subscriptions are available (free for contributors, sponsored features), feel free to drop us an email for more details.

And big things are coming 👌🏻🚀

Sunrise was the best calendar app we’ve ever seen. When Microsoft decided to shut it down, we looked for alternatives. We tried everything on the market: free, paid, mobile only, macOS only… everything we could get our hands on.

In the end, we didn’t find a proper alternative. Some were lacking 3rd party integrations, others were hideous, many were unmaintained. We were stuck, we had a few months before the end of Sunrise so we decided to build an alternative: Kin.

Kin is our vision of a simple & connected calendar where you can manage your life in one interface without the hassle of juggling between websites, calendar and other services apps.

From the get go, we wanted Kin to be usable by anyone, from anywhere without any constraint, today is the day we deliver on that promise.

Kin is now open source 🎉

What are we releasing?

• Server code (Node.js / express)
• Web client (React / redux)

The iOS app will be open sourced as well but first, we want to stabilise its UX with our awesome beta testers👌🏼

What does it mean for you?

• You can run your own version of Kin, on your own infrastructure.
• You can tune Kin to your liking, integrate it with the apps you use and customise it without any restriction. If you can, please open source your changes.

If you don’t know anything about open source or hosting, you should wait our upcoming announcements about the future of Kin.today.

Big things are coming👌🏼🚀

Why are we releasing Kin?

Our goal has always been to deliver the best calendar experience for as many people as possible. We talked to a lot of folks in the tech industry — both on the maker side (calendar companies) and on the investor side (VCs). We met awesome people and had fantastic conversations.

This led us to a massive number of foreseeable futures and we had to sift through it with one compass, what we believe in:

• We want Kin to be the simplest life management solution, yet powerful enough and available on as many platforms as possible.
• Kin is based on integrations: we want to ease the work of any company that would like to integrate its product.
• We don’t want to tweet “Don’t sell your company”.
  Meaning we don’t want to raise money without a monetisation path, ending up in a dead end where the only solution for us is an exit killing Kin.
• We don’t want to compromise with your data: sharing or selling your data with other companies is NOT right.

We value transparency, trust and quality.

Most of the solutions we discussed for the future were forcing us to compromise on one of our values. That’s not something we are willing to accept. In the end, the best way to get where we want to be is by open sourcing our solution, and that’s what we just did.

Kin is now open source 🚀

If you agree with our values and think we should discuss feature sponsorship or investments, please do get in touch with us at hello@kin.today

[Note: this article was first published on our blog]

We spent a long time choosing a license, the final contenders were the Apache License 2.0 and the Beerware License. Eventually, we settled on the first one but we’re still open for some of the Beerware License perks if you happen to meet us one day 😉

A little bit of context…

Sunrise is the best calendar app we’ve ever seen. When Microsoft decided to shut it down, we looked for alternatives. We tried everything on the market: free, paid, iOS only, macOS only… everything we could get our hands on. [Note: if you believe we didn’t try your app, please get in touch. It’ll be our pleasure to review your service]

In the end, we didn’t find a proper alternative. Some were lacking 3rd party integrations, others were hideous, many were unmaintained. We were stuck, we had a few months before the end of Sunrise so we decided to build an alternative: Kin.

Kin is our vision of a simple & connected calendar where you can manage your life in one interface without the hassle of juggling between websites, calendar and other services apps.

We launched the beta this summer and we’re using a waiting list to gradually let people in.

Like us, you’re building a wonderful product and you don’t want to spend a lot of money?
Then this article is for you! By the end, you’ll know how we manage to handle thousands of users for free.

The #lean problem

When you decide to build a brand new app, you never know *if* and *when* you will get a cohort of users.

• If you’re funded and you can afford to build and run infrastructure: go for it.
  
• If you’re trying it the #lean way, you’re in a dead end scenario: you don’t make any money out of your product so you really really need to find cheap but good enough solutions.
  

What you know is that you want your app to be successful and get past those surge of users reinforced. In our case, since Sunrise was dying, we wanted to be able to welcome as many Sunrise users as possible to try Kin without disruptions for our existing users.

Don’t let users actually use your product

You want to be super lean, as a result you NEED to get something out of the people using your product:

• Need partnerships and some numbers to back you up?
  -> Get users to sign up for a waitlist to your product.

• Need feedback for your product?
  -> Only send invites to the people that went “the extra step” of asking you directly to get an invite.

• Need some real life “controlled” stress-testing?
  -> Just open the “flood gate” on your waitlist!

Hell yes: you don’t really need to let your users play with your product, it would kill your minimal infrastructure. You really only need them to show you if they are interested or not in your product. So just get them to give you enough information to be able to contact them in the future. This way you won’t have to deal with a huge infrastructure to handle surges of users.

For Kin, we decided an email address was enough. Therefore we had to design and build an appealing landing page and… that’s it!
[By the way, we did it with the help of Pelostudio. Trust us, they’re awesome]

Use someone else’s infrastructure!

You will still need a Minimum Viable Engagement Product to collect information about interested users. Can you actually afford infrastructure to sustain thousands of concurrent users due to a slashdot effect?

In our case, we custom built a landing page that weights under 300Kb. We used as much “free infrastructure forever” as possible: being lean doesn’t mean trading money for time. You should be lean with your time and having something that you can just keep on for the rest of your life without caring about it is absolutely awesome (and good for your sleep).

In fact, this challenge only exists if your landing page is dynamic and needs server computing power. So let’s strip it down a bit: just build a static landing page where the only javascript scripts that are used are on the client side.

With that in mind, you basically can host your website wherever you want: Dropbox, Github,… or Cloudflare.

They are well known for their CDN capabilities: their job is literally to handle billions of requests per minute all day. And that’s exactly what you need.

The cherry on the cake with Cloudflare is that it’s completely free to use. Yes, no kidding, you can get a magnificent infrastructure to host your landing page for $/€/£ 0!

Now you should be asking yourselves: “Mmmm they talked about static landing page but they also said they needed the email addresses, how in hell can they store the email addresses on Cloudflare?!”

The answer is pretty straightforward: we can’t.

But you know who can? Slack.

You: “Slack, as in Slack the business messaging app?"Us: "YES!”

Slack is first and foremost a communication platform: they are for many companies the main hub for a lot of different services.

What it means for you is that Slack has an awesome API with which you can play: you’re gonna send the client email address directly from its browser to Slack. Just set up an incoming webhook in your Slack settings, call the URL when your user posts its email address and you’re done.

In the end, you get a landing page on one of the best CDN on the market -meaning anyone on earth will display it crazy fast-, plus when this person is interested in your product, you get its email address in your favorite tool: Slack.

Why it’s awesome

This solution is awesome because:

1. It’s free: both Cloudflare and Slack have free plans that are perfect for this use case 💸
2. It’s easy to put in place: DNS setup takes less than 24 hours, Slack setup can be done in less than 10 minutes, up to you to code a simple landing page in no time 🙃
3. It’s easy to manage: once setup, you don’t have to worry about anything 😎
4. It’s scalable: once setup, you can keep this landing up and running for months or even years. The only limit is the number of messages that are archived in Slack: 10k. But if you reach 10k signups and don’t have time to save those in another tool, that means you definitely should get a real infrastructure ;) Otherwise you can just do like us for Kin: use your free Slack credit to get the Premium Slack version with unlimited archive (= unlimited signups stored in Slack ❤️ )
5. It’s proven to work: we were featured in the NYMag, on Betalist, on Product Hunt, on the Trello blog and we never were worried about load issues or slow response times.
   We got more than 21k signups in less than 3 weeks.

If you want to see a live example and need a great calendar? Go to http://kin.today and enter your email 😊

Today we reached 2000 signups.

First, we would like to thank you all for believing in Kin as an alternative to Sunrise.
We started in june with a pretty simple aim: build an app that could gather all our calendars and display them in a nice unique interface.
Now we know that we’re not the only ones who want this kind of product.

Second, we would like to introduce our public product roadmap.
In order for Kin to be used and loved, we must know what you want and need. The simplest way to get to this point is to let you vote for the features you want the most.
We settled on a Trello board that enables you to easily see where we stand, what we’re working on right now and where we’re going next.

Read, vote and share: Kin Public Roadmap

Ben & Yann

That’s exactly what we (= Kin team) think each time a new calendar app pops up on Product Hunt, Reddit or Hacker News.

We all have busy lives: work + kids + social events + concerts + games + …

Some of us use calendar apps to get a better view on each one of these daily activities: you may have Outlook at work, Google Calendar for private events or even Facebook for birthday parties.
Others don’t use anything at all.

Now let me tell you a story.

Jess is a super active woman working for Acme Corp, who has a family (kids named Ben & Robin) and a dog. A few minutes ago, Ben told her that his end-of-year party would take place in two weeks at SuperPalaceRestaurant. She now needs to book an appointment to the hairdresser for both Ben and her. As a matter of fact, Robin will also need a new outfit to match the party theme. That will require at least 3hrs of shopping. Oh, I forgot to mention, Jess just received a phone call from her colleague asking her if she’s available tuesday night for a dinner with an important client.

OMG.

In less than 2 minutes, Jess just received personal information, professional one, had to take decision based on her memories and in the meantime plan the next days and weeks.

Do you still think existing calendar apps can help Jess?
Do you still think that switching between her professional calendar app, her personal one, her browser, her notes app is gonna help her?

At Kin, we don’t think so.

One interface to rule them all

We think that a single interface to view and manage your life, whether it’s personal or professional, is the right path to less stressful days.

This single interface should be simple to remove the burden that Jess experienced & yet connected to all the services she uses: professional calendar, personal calendar, todo list app, tickets app and so on.

To help Jess and the millions who identify themselves as Jess, we’re building it.

What to expect

Transparency is key at Kin, both within the company and with our users. You can expect from us a web and mobile application that you can rely on everyday.

We started by the web version because:

• it was technically simpler than native mobile,
• we could iterate more often based on our beloved beta-testers feedbacks.

Now that we have a solid beta user base, we’re adding new providers (hey Github!) so that Kin really becomes the unique place for your life management.

Mobile is coming soon with a native iOS app.

We need you

If you think Jess is a bit like you: Try Kin!

If you want to share the love: Tweet Kin / Facebook Kin

If you’re a great Android developer: hello@kin.today

Today we’re opening the beta to the firsts users who signed up on Kin.today.

Feedbacks

If you ever encounter an issue, if something doesn’t feel right, if you would prefer that over this, …whenever you have a comment, just contact us at one of the following:

1. Drop us an email at hello@kin.today
2. Write a post in the Facebook beta group
3. Tweet us at @Kin_Today.
   

Don’t be shy: we love feedbacks!

Features

Kin currently supports Google Calendar (one or more accounts), Facebook, Eventbrite and Meetup. We plan to add several services to this list based on your needs: speak up so that we prioritize the ones you really need on a day-to-day basis!

Regarding Google Calendar, you can create, edit and delete events. Invitations, alerts, invitees management are coming soon.

Share the love

We aim to be as transparent as possible, so feel free to share what you think of Kin. Again: don’t be shy :)

We were wrong.
For quite a long time, we thought calendars didn’t add any value to our day-to-day lives. It wasn’t the calendars’ fault: the apps we used were just way more complicated than what we needed.

Clean slate.
We started from scratch to design and build the calendar experience we think is the right one: simple yet connected.

Simple enough to help you better understand when, where and with whom you need to be.
Connected to integrate all the services that you use everyday.

Kin is live today for a small batch of users. We are gathering feedbacks and comments in order to improve it while we build and scale the infrastructure behind.

Join us for the beta on Kin.today, we cannot wait to show you what’s coming next.