Getting started
Four steps to a first booking. Read →
Help · Appointments.software
One page. Nine real answers, not nine thin routes.
Every section below composes from material already on this site — the engines, the not-built list, the pricing tiers, the FAQ — rather than restating it thinly on its own URL.
Admin setup
Publishing slots, registering rooms, who may do which. Read →
Custom domain
Claim a hostname on any tier, Personal included. Read →
White-label
Remove the badge, brand the emails, at Pro. Read →
How booking works
The four-check family wall and the overlap test, in order. Read →
Troubleshooting
What a rejected booking actually means. Read →
Data & privacy
What a booking record holds, and what it never holds. Read →
Pricing
The planned tiers, side by side. Read →
FAQ
The full question list, in one place. Read →
Getting started
- Book a conversation ([email protected]).
- Pick one surface: conferences or rooms.
- Have a staff account publish availability — slots or bookable resources.
- Test one booking end to end and watch the family wall or the overlap check reject a bad one on purpose.
- Subscribe to the .ics feed and confirm it carries no names.
- Add your custom domain (free, any tier).
- Reserve early access for white-label branding when you are ready for it.
Admin setup
Publishing a conference slot is staff-only, checked before any slot logic runs; a parent, student, or non-staff session is refused outright. Registering a bookable resource (room, gym, field, auditorium, cafeteria, equipment) is likewise a facilities-staff action. Neither surface has a self-serve signup today — an admin account is provisioned through the conversation in getting started, not a form.
Custom domain
Every tier, Personal included, can claim a hostname. See the white-label section on the home page for the full DNS-TXT claim-and-verify lifecycle and its guardrails (minors denied domain control, one host per account, no cross-tenant leak).
White-label
White-label branding — your logo, colors, and the badge removed — unlocks at Pro. The sending domain and the consent/legal footer are never white-labelable, at any tier — see the gating table on the home page’s white-label section.
How booking actually works
Four checks run, in order, for a conference booking, and any one of them blocks the whole booking: the slot is open; the guardian is a recorded guardian of the named student; the student’s school matches the slot’s school; the slot is not already taken. A facility booking runs one check: does the requested window overlap any live booking on the same resource. See the full explanation and the family wall on the home page.
Troubleshooting
blocked_not_child_guardian- The caller is not a recorded guardian of the named student. This is not a bug — it is the family wall working.
resource_double_booked- The requested window overlaps a live booking on that resource. Try a window that starts exactly when the conflicting one ends.
suppressed_no_consent- The family has not granted the specific consent purpose that channel (SMS or voice) requires. Email consent does not carry over.
queued_not_charged- Expected on every deposit quote. No payment provider is wired; nothing is ever charged.
Data & privacy
See the full data section on the home page: bookings carry opaque references only, never a name or contact field; access is staff-gated on write and guardian-gated on read; nothing here is public.
Pricing
See the pricing section on the home page for the full four-tier ladder. All figures are the planned launch tiers, not a live purchase option today.
FAQ
Can we book counselor or nurse appointments with this today?
Not yet, and we would rather say that here than in a pilot. There is no dedicated bookable-slot route for either role. What exists is a counselor caseload and confidential-notes workspace and a health-office clinical-visit module, and both are real and role-gated — but neither is a slot calendar. The engine that publishes a teacher’s conference slots does not care WHO publishes a slot; it is keyed by an opaque staff reference. Extending it to a counselor or nurse is the same mechanism, not a new one, and it is on the near side of our roadmap, not the far side.
Is there a waitlist when a conference slot is full?
No. A full slot returns a clean, honest rejection, and there is no queue behind it today. A family that wants the next opening has to check back on the availability view rather than being auto-promoted when a spot frees up.
Does the calendar feed sync both ways?
No. The .ics feed is a read-only publish — a spec-correct RFC-5545 feed a family or a staff member can subscribe to in their own calendar app. A change made on that end (moved, deleted, renamed) never flows back into this system. If you need two-way sync today, this is not that product yet.
Do reminders actually get sent by text or by phone call?
Not yet. The consent wall that decides WHICH channel a reminder is even allowed to use is real and enforced — SMS and voice each require their own, stricter opt-in, separate from email. But no carrier is wired underneath any channel today, so every reminder resolves to an honestly queued state and none is actually delivered. We would rather ship the consent wall first and the transport second than the other way around.
Can we charge a deposit when a family books?
The math is there: a flat or percentage deposit, floored to the cent, capped at the base price so the balance is never negative. What is not there is a payment rail — the computed status is always queued_not_charged and zero cents ever actually move. If your workflow requires collecting money at the moment of booking, that piece is not wired yet.
What actually happens when a guardian books a conference slot?
Four checks run, in order, and any one of them blocks the whole booking: the slot has to be open; the guardian has to be a recorded guardian of the named student, checked against the same family relationship data the parent hub itself uses, not a duplicated rule; the student’s school has to match the slot’s school; and the slot must not already be taken by a live booking. If all four hold, the booking is written to a real table and a confirmation job is queued. If any one fails, nothing is booked and nothing is queued.
What happens if two staff members try to book the same gym at the same time?
The second request loses, cleanly. The engine checks the requested window against every live booking already held on that resource using a half-open interval overlap test, and a window that overlaps an existing booking is rejected outright — nothing is held for the losing request. Two bookings that merely touch at the boundary (one ending exactly when the next starts) are not considered a conflict, so back-to-back use of the same room is allowed.
Is any of this AI-assisted?
No. Every decision described on this page — slot availability, the family wall, the overlap check, the consent-channel resolution, the deposit math — is deterministic structure with no model in the loop anywhere. There is no assistant reading booking data on this product.
What does it cost?
There is a plan, not a live checkout. Personal is free (one calendar, unlimited conference-slot publishing). Pro is $12/user/mo and adds white-label branding and reminder/deposit quoting. Business & Teams is $18/user/mo and adds room and resource booking. Enterprise is custom, for per-tenant licensing. None of these are a live purchase option today — reserving early access does not create a payment or store a card.
Do I need to pay extra to use my own domain and remove your branding?
No, not for the domain. A custom domain is on every plan, the free one included — most appointment-link tools charge for that and reserve full white-label for an enterprise contract. Removing our branding and applying your logo and colors is one paid tier up (Pro), not a sales call. The engine that verifies a domain and binds a brand to an account runs in production in our K-12 and studio arms; the self-serve setup screen for this product is in development. Notification emails carry your display name and reply-to; the sending domain and the legal/consent footer stay ours by design, at every tier.
Is Appointments.software a school, a district, or a nonprofit?
No. It is a for-profit software product built by Stanley Studios. It is not a school, not a district, and not a nonprofit, and nothing here is a charitable gift of any kind.
Does any of this touch a student’s academic record?
No. A conference booking or a room booking is scheduling data — an appointment fact — not a student-record or census fact. A booking references a student by an opaque reference and carries no grade, no discipline history, no health record, and no directory field.
Who can publish conference slots or book a room?
Publishing a conference slot is staff-only, gated before any slot logic runs at all — a parent, student, or any non-staff session is refused outright. Booking a room or resource is likewise a facilities-staff action; the route computes the staff check and the engine re-checks it again on the write, so the gate is enforced twice, not once.