HACKER Q&A
📣 gradschool

Calendar Sync/Scraping Tools?


Hi HN. Long story short: my girlfriend is a massage therapist being squeezed for big commissions by treatwell.com, a booking calendar and SEO service. After she signed up with it, treatwell curtailed the ability to export data from treatwell's calendar to her google calendar, probably as a deliberate lock-in tactic. Although treatwell reads her google calendar to avoid clashes, it writes only to its own when someone books through treatwell. With her clientele steadily increasing through independent referrals, she's investigating alternatives including self-hosting, but assuming it's not worth ditching treatwell entirely, what tools would you recommend for scraping her treatwell calendar to keep her google calendar in sync with it?


  👤 henryshapiro Accepted Answer ✓
:wave: While not _exactly_ the scenario we envisioned when creating it, you might want to check out Reclaim's Calendar Sync feature.

We basically can read events from any source within Google Calendar, assuming you have access to the calendar (either because it's shared to an account you have access to in Google or because you have OAuth access to the account where the calendar originates) and then sync them over to any other calendar that you have access to. You can also assign some nice custom privacy settings to those synced events so that they show up with whatever level of visibility you want others to have when they view your calendar.

So in your GF's case, she'd sign up for Reclaim, set her primary calendar as the non-Treatwell calendar, and then set the Treatwell calendar (assuming it's a shared calendar that her Google login can access) as the source. Then events get synced and you're good to go!

https://reclaim.ai/features/calendar-sync