Arch Calendar launches here on August 4, so I wanted to share something before then.
We ran a paid closed beta for 605 days. Not free. People paid from day one, which meant every piece of feedback had money behind it.
The counterintuitive part: our biggest retention gain did not come from shipping anything. It came from cutting features that looked useful on a roadmap and did nothing for the people actually using the app. Week 24 retention roughly doubled after we removed things.
Meanwhile, most calendar and task tools right now are going the other direction: more AI, more automation, more of your day handed off to something else. We went with a different bet. The tagline is "What did you do today? Not your AI. You."
Hey Product Hunt π
I'm Ted, co-founder and co-CEO of Arch Calendar.
A few years ago I realized my day was scattered across three apps. Tasks in one, events in another, notes in a third, and me stitching them together every morning. No tool actually showed me my whole day in one place. So we built the calendar we wanted for ourselves.
Arch Calendar is one minimalist calendar that holds your tasks, events, and notes together. Not three tools bolted into a sidebar, but a single place where your whole day lives.
We also thought hard about AI. Right now every productivity tool is racing to take the day off your hands: auto-schedule this, auto-categorize that, let the agent decide. We went the other way. We use AI to clear the busywork and hand back the part that actually matters, deciding what today is for. A calendar that helps you live your day, not one that lives it for you.
We didn't rush here. Arch Calendar spent 605 days in paid closed beta with people who used it every single day, and their feedback shaped almost every corner of the product. Today is the first time it's open to everyone.
I'd love to hear how you spend your day and where your current setup falls short. Every comment gets a reply from me today. Thank you for taking a look π
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
I really like the onboarding process! :) The whole experience is good. It is simple to use.
Will there be an option to sync calendars of other people? :)
@busmark_w_nikaΒ
Thank you, that's great to hear πββοΈ Onboarding is the part we rewrote the most, so it's good to know it lands.
On syncing other people's calendars: that already works today, through Google Calendar. If you've added someone else's calendar in Google Calendar, just connect that Google account to Arch Calendar and it shows up exactly the same way. Whatever you see in Google Calendar, you see in Arch Calendar.
Let me know if anything looks off after you connect it.
@busmark_w_nikaΒ Thank you so much for taking the time to explore Arch Calendar and leave such a thoughtful comment, Nika! I really appreciate your feedback π
Finally, a calendar that trusts me to run my own day instead of planning it for me. The single view for tasks, events, and notes just feels right after bouncing between three apps every morning.