FREIGABE is out of beta

From invite-only beta to open signup

In April we announced the beta of FREIGABE, our calendar availability sync. Access was by invitation and billing did not exist yet. Since August, that is history: anyone can sign up at freigabe.dev, connect their calendars, and start a 7-day free trial. After the trial it is €5 per month, or €50 per year, and you can cancel anytime.

This post covers what FREIGABE does today, how the pricing works, and what changed since the beta announcement. If you landed on the older post first: this is the one to read.

What FREIGABE does today

FREIGABE keeps your availability in sync across all your calendars. You connect your accounts, they join a sync group, and every event in one calendar shows up as a private "busy" blocker in the others. The blocker carries the time slot and a label naming the source calendar, nothing else: no title, no attendees, no description. Any one of your calendars then shows your real availability, and "are you free Thursday?" becomes a single glance.

Sources are Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, and any calendar published as an iCalendar (.ics) feed, which covers Apple iCloud, Nextcloud, and most booking tools. Changes propagate through provider webhooks within seconds, with a polling safety net behind them.

One flat price

Most calendar sync tools charge per connected calendar or per sync pair. That is fine with two calendars and painful with six: one of your own plus one per client or project is the normal case for consultants and freelancers, and it lands you in the tools' upper tiers fast. FREIGABE charges one flat price, with unlimited connected accounts within fair use. Your fourth, fifth, or tenth calendar costs nothing extra.

The monthly plan is €5 with a 7-day free trial. The yearly plan is €50, which works out to two months free. Teams that want shared billing and administration get volume pricing on request. For the numbers side by side with CalendarBridge, OneCal, SyncThemCalendars, Reclaim and others, see the comparison pages on freigabe.dev, each with the competitor's published prices and the date they were checked.

What changed since the beta

• Open signup and billing. No more invitations. Sign up with email, Google, or Microsoft, start the trial, and subscribe monthly or yearly. Sign-in and calendar access stay separate grants, so signing up never asks for calendar permissions.
• Any iCalendar feed as a source. Paste the .ics link of a calendar you cannot connect directly and its busy times flow into your sync group. A calendar published busy-only never even exposes its event details to FREIGABE. A step-by-step guide covers Outlook, Google, and Apple Calendar.
• Busy-only feeds out. A pasted calendar cannot be written to, so FREIGABE publishes a feed of the busy times in your sync group that the other side can subscribe to. Sync stays bidirectional even when one end is read-only.
• Microsoft without the admin, where possible. Personal Microsoft accounts (Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live) connect directly. A Microsoft 365 work account may still need the organization's admin to approve FREIGABE; the dashboard now walks you through that with a consent link to forward, and the pasted-feed path works when approval is not an option.
• Per-calendar direction. Each calendar in the group can share out, receive in, both, or be paused. Pausing removes its blockers; re-enabling backfills them.
• Sync status you can see. The dashboard shows an always-on sync indicator and flags a calendar whose sync is broken, with a reset that re-fetches the calendar and heals stray blockers.
• A new landing page. Animated demos of the sync, the privacy model, and onboarding, plus guides and comparison pages, and a dashboard that works on a phone.
• Hundreds of engine fixes. Five months of production use with real Google and Microsoft tenants surfaced edge cases in recurring events, token expiry, rate limits, and cleanup. The sync engine that runs today is considerably harder to knock over than the one we shipped in April.

What the name means

Freigabe is the German word for clearance: the sign-off, the go-ahead. It’s also the verb you’d use for sharing a calendar, einen Kalender freigeben, which is exactly what it does.

What is next

CalDAV support is still on the roadmap, which would turn Apple iCloud, Fastmail, Nextcloud, and self-hosted calendars from feed-only sources into fully writable targets. Full-detail sync, copying complete events instead of busy blockers for users who want it, is the other open item from the beta announcement. Both wait on demand from paying users; tell us if you need them.

Built at SAILBAHN.dev

FREIGABE is built and operated by SAILBAHN GmbH in Vienna. The stack is unchanged since the beta: Next.js, Supabase, and a job queue on plain Postgres, deployed on Google Cloud Run in the EU. The beta announcement still has the architecture story if you are curious. We use FREIGABE every day for our own client calendars, which is why it exists in the first place.