RadiusHQ vs TidyCal: Multi-Step Bookings or a Proven Coach Link

A colorist paints a client’s roots, then waits while the color sets. A coach, meanwhile, just wants clients to stop emailing back and forth about whether Tuesday at 2 works. Both of them need a booking link, but they need very different ones. RadiusHQ and TidyCal are both lifetime deals on AppSumo, both pitched as alternatives to Calendly and Acuity, and they pull in opposite directions.

We haven’t tested either tool. Everything here comes from the listings and, for TidyCal, a promotional demo video.

Where they differ most

RadiusHQ is built for service businesses whose visits have parts. Clients can pick one or several services, choose a professional or take the first available one, and pay for the whole cart in one checkout. Each service can be required or optional, so a consult can be mandatory while a follow-up is an add-on.

The feature to look at first is overlap booking. A pro can take other bookings during processing time, like the color-setting example above. If your appointments have dead time inside them, that’s capacity you’re wasting with a scheduler that treats every slot as one solid block.

TidyCal takes the opposite approach. It’s a clean booking-link tool with one-on-one, group and recurring booking types, custom availability, buffers and booking limits. It’s aimed at coaches, consultants and freelancers, and nothing in its listing suggests multi-service carts or overlapping bookings. If your work is a single call or session, you won’t miss them.

Payments and what they cost you

This is where TidyCal pulls ahead. You can take payment at booking through Stripe or PayPal, sell packages and subscriptions so a client pays upfront for several sessions, and create coupon codes. For a coach selling a six-session block, that’s one link and no separate invoicing step.

There’s a catch. TidyCal charges a 1% platform fee on paid bookings, on top of the Stripe or PayPal fees, and only Pro removes it. On a $200 session that’s $2. Small, but permanent.

RadiusHQ’s payments are narrower. It takes PayPal at booking with a pending hold, then approval, then capture, and you choose a refund rule: always, never, or refund if cancelled a set number of days ahead. A payments table and a revenue dashboard come with it. The listing mentions no platform fee, which is a point in its favour, but it also says nothing about packages or coupons, so assume you don’t get them. Stripe is listed as coming soon. Until it ships, a business whose clients expect to pay by card is out of luck.

Reminders, branding and the page clients see

Reminders are close to even. RadiusHQ sends emails for confirmation, reschedule and cancel, plus 24-hour and 1-hour reminders. TidyCal’s $29 tier sends email reminders too, and you can write your own confirmation and reminder text.

TidyCal’s $79 Agency tier adds 10 SMS reminders a month. That’s thin, and the listing says SMS works only in the US and Canada for now. RadiusHQ lists WhatsApp and Instagram among its integrations but never says what they do, so don’t count on texts from either tool.

Branding is a real difference. On TidyCal’s lifetime plans, a Powered by TidyCal bar stays at the bottom of your booking page and a TidyCal logo appears in emails. Neither tier gets a custom domain. Pro removes the branding for $8.25 a month billed yearly, which is about $99 a year. That’s the recurring bill you were trying to avoid.

RadiusHQ’s listing doesn’t mention a branding bar at all. It gives you a page on yourslug.radiushq.cc with themes, cover images, social links and a live desktop and mobile preview. A custom domain is described only as something you can add “later,” so it’s unclear whether it exists today. If you read that vagueness as a no, you won’t be disappointed.

Price, seats and tier limits

RadiusHQ has one tier at $19, down from a $348 list price. You get unlimited bookings, one workspace and up to five team members with owner, admin and member roles. There’s a 60-day activation deadline and AppSumo’s 60-day refund window. The booking window is capped at 60 days, which is fine for a salon but short if you sell long-lead work.

TidyCal has two tiers. The $29 tier (list $144) is for one person and includes unlimited bookings, up to 10 connected calendars, and automatic Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams links. The $79 tier (list $240) adds three team members, a team booking page, round-robin and collective meetings, a custom reply-to address and the SMS allowance.

Teammates on TidyCal don’t buy plans. Each signs up for a free account and accepts your invite, and on a free account they can connect only one calendar. Also note that the deal is only for people without an existing paid TidyCal account.

On raw value for a small team, RadiusHQ is hard to beat on paper. Five seats for $19 is cheaper than TidyCal’s $79 for four. But the cheapness only matters if the product is still around in three years.

How much proof is behind each

TidyCal has 937 AppSumo reviews averaging 4.32 out of 5, and it was built by the AppSumo team itself. The review summary is marketing copy, and it admits occasional branding complaints. Even so, nearly a thousand reviews tell you far more than one.

RadiusHQ has a single review with a 5.00 average. That tells us nothing. A lifetime deal depends on the company continuing to run its servers, and a young product with one reviewer gives you little to judge by. The CSV export of bookings, clients and payments is a sensible escape hatch, and we’d use it regularly.

The Google Calendar integration is also listed for RadiusHQ without detail. We don’t know if sync is one-way or two-way, which matters if you block personal time there. Ask before relying on it. TidyCal’s listing is clearer here: it supports Google, Outlook/Office 365 and Apple calendars, and the demo shows anything already on a connected calendar being blocked automatically. That demo is promotional, so treat it as a walkthrough rather than a review.

Which one to buy

Buy RadiusHQ if you run a salon, clinic or studio where one visit has several parts, your clients are happy to pay through PayPal, and you can live with a product that hasn’t built a track record. At $19 with a 60-day refund window, the risk is small enough to try on a real week of bookings.

Buy TidyCal’s $29 tier if you’re a solo coach, consultant or freelancer who wants Stripe or PayPal, packages and coupons, and a vendor with a visible history. Accept the footer bar, or plan on paying for Pro. We’d skip the $79 tier for most people, because the SMS cap and the US and Canada limit weaken the extra cost.

Skip both if you need a fully white-labelled page on your own domain, or a team bigger than five. Whichever you pick, run one real booking through it, with your calendar and your payment setup, before the 60 days are up. TidyCal has a free plan at tidycal.com to try first. RadiusHQ’s listing mentions no free plan, so the refund window is your trial.