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Add-on service

The calendar belongs on your site, not on a vendor’s.

A rented scheduler is a third-party service sitting in your most important moment: it charges monthly, it wants consent before it even appears, and your customers’ data lives elsewhere. This one runs on your own hosting — and the three sentences before this one simply cease to apply.

Discuss appointment booking See the stages

The consent dialog stands exactly where someone wanted to book.

An embedded scheduler loads from someone else’s server. That makes it a recipient of personal data, and your privacy policy has to name it — usually including a transfer to a third country. The clean legal answer is a consent gate: anyone who wants to book first sees a grey box with two buttons. That is the most expensive moment on the whole site, and what stands there is a question that has nothing to do with the appointment. Run the calendar on your own hosting and it is not just the box that disappears, but the paragraph in the privacy policy, the monthly fee, and the dependency on that vendor still existing next year.

In use

It runs on this site — just book an appointment

The BTECH SOLUTIONS booking flow, in operation since 1 August

Until the end of July a rented widget ran here. It has been replaced, and the difference is countable: two fewer third-party hosts in this site’s security policy, one paragraph fewer in the privacy policy, and no consent dialog in front of the calendar. What you see there is the same system I deliver — not a demo build. You can go all the way to the confirmation e-mail and then cancel again through the link inside it.

  • No consent dialog in front of the calendar — nothing loads from foreign servers
  • Double bookings are technically impossible, not merely unlikely
  • Confirmation e-mail with a calendar file; cancel and reschedule without an account
  • Booking data lives outside the web directory — a deployment cannot overwrite it
  • Runs on ordinary shared hosting with PHP, no dedicated server needed
Try the booking flow

The example shown is my own system on my own site — an in-house build, not an independent client project. I say so rather than leave it out. It has been in operation since 1 August; there is no client installation to point at yet, and I do not invent one.

Why it is built differently

Four properties a rented widget cannot have

  • Two people, one slot — impossible

    Almost every system first checks whether a slot is free and then writes. Between the two lies a window, and with appointments that window is precisely the last free slot. Here the appointment IS the file: the operating system decides in a single step who gets to create it. The second person gets a decline instead of a double booking.

  • One paragraph fewer in your privacy policy

    No third-party recipient, no transfer to a third country, no data-processing agreement with a vendor whose terms can change. The booking data stays where your website already lives.

  • No fee per appointment, none per month

    There is no account, no user limit and no plan that gets more expensive with the next employee. What is built once keeps running — including when a vendor doubles its prices or discontinues the product.

  • Cancel without calling, reschedule without an account

    The confirmation e-mail carries a personal link. Through it your customer cancels or reschedules on their own — without registering and without calling you. The slot is released immediately and becomes bookable again.

Process

How the system becomes yours

  1. Capture your hours

    Opening hours per weekday, the length of an appointment, the buffer between them, how short-notice bookings may be, how far ahead, how many per day. Those six figures are the entire rule set — and the session in which they emerge is usually the first honest audit of one’s own day.

  2. Integration and styling

    The calendar takes on your site’s colours, spacing and type through its own design values. It is operable by keyboard and readable with a screen reader — both are tested, not claimed.

  3. E-mails and calendar file

    Confirmation to your customer and to you, with a calendar file for Outlook, Apple or Google. We write the copy together — it is the only thing your customer still reads from you after booking.

  4. Stress test and handover

    Two simultaneous bookings on the same slot, cancel and rebook, the daylight-saving switch, a failed mail send. Afterwards you get the one file that holds every rule — you can change your own hours yourself.

Stages

Three stages — you start where it pays off

The stages build on one another and share the same storage. Upgrading later therefore costs the difference, not the full price — something is added, nothing is rebuilt.

Stage 1 — Appointments

Book, confirm, cancel. For anyone still coordinating by phone and callback today.

from 1,690 € two to three weeks

  • A calendar on your site, with no consent dialog in front of it
  • Your hours: opening times, duration, buffer, lead time, horizon, appointments per day
  • Confirmation e-mail to both sides, with a calendar file to add
  • Cancel and reschedule link, no account and no password
  • Protection against double bookings, automated entries and bulk booking
  • Booking data outside the web directory — a deployment cannot touch it
Request stage 1

Stage 2 — Operations

So it still holds while you are away. For anyone who does not just take appointments but runs them.

from 2,690 € three to four weeks

  • Everything from stage 1
  • A reminder e-mail before the appointment — the single strongest lever against no-shows
  • Blocked periods for holidays and public holidays, without eating into your daily limit
  • Your existing calendar is read: busy times from Outlook, Apple or Google disappear on their own
  • An overview of upcoming appointments, behind a key stored outside the web directory
  • A retention period with automatic deletion — data protection that happens by itself
Request stage 2

Stage 3 — Your workflow

Several appointment types, several people, your language. When one calendar is no longer enough.

from 4,900 € six to eight weeks

  • Everything from stage 2
  • Several appointment types, each with its own duration, buffer and hours
  • Several people or rooms, each with their own calendar
  • A second language for the interface, the e-mails and the calendar file
  • A connection to your own system — every booking is a readable file that can be handed on
  • “From”, because appointment types and headcount drive the scope; the figure is fixed after the first conversation
Discuss stage 3

All prices are final: under § 19 of the German VAT Act (small-business rule) no VAT is charged and nothing is added on top. Upgrading later costs the difference between the stages. There is no monthly fee and no per-appointment fee — the system creates no running costs beyond the hosting you already pay for. Ongoing care is available but optional, and only as an addition to an existing care contract: a subscription for something that runs by itself would be a fee for nothing.

What this is not for

  • Payment or a deposit at the moment of booking. The system cannot do that today — I say so here, not after you have signed.
  • A practice with ten treatment rooms and a shift roster. What is missing there is dedicated software, not a calendar on the website.
  • Two appointments a month. A contact form is more honest for that — and a quarter of the price.
  • Anyone who wants a finished interface in five minutes. A rented widget is the right tool then, and I will tell you so.

Questions

Frequently asked

Nothing. There is no account, no per-appointment fee and no user limit. The system runs on the same hosting as your website — what you already pay for that does not change. That is precisely the difference to a rented scheduler: it gets more expensive with every employee and every year; this one does not.

No. Nothing loads from foreign servers, so there is no recipient to consent to. The details your customer enters for the appointment are processed to carry it out — that needs no consent, only a paragraph in your privacy policy. I draft that with you.

One gets it, the other immediately receives a clear decline with the next available times. That is not a matter of fast servers but of construction: the claim on a slot is granted in a single, indivisible step. There is no moment in which the slot looks free twice.

From stage 2, read-only: the system fetches busy times from Outlook, Apple or Google and hides them. So you still enter a private appointment where you always have, and it is no longer bookable on the website. Deliberately read-only — writing would require access to your account.

From stage 2 you block periods. One detail matters that only shows up in daily use: a block must not count against your daily limit. Otherwise a two-hour block in the morning closes the whole day, including the free afternoon. Here it does not count.

As long as you decide — from stage 2 the system deletes old bookings by itself afterwards. That is the part of data protection nobody thinks about in daily life, which is exactly why it belongs in the software rather than on a to-do list.

On ordinary shared hosting with PHP, yes — no dedicated server is needed. I look at your plan beforehand and tell you before quoting whether it works. I do not sell an integration I have not checked.

Every booking exists as a single, readable file — no proprietary format, no database someone would have to export it from. You can copy it, hand it on or analyse it without asking me. That is not a concession, it is how it is built.

How many appointments does the telephone cost you each month?

That is the calculation that comes before the decision — and it usually adds up faster than expected. We go through it in one conversation, free of charge. If it turns out a contact form is enough, I will say so.

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