news.ycombinator.com• 3d ago• 1 min read
Calendly WhatsApp integration on free Calendly planI built an unofficial Whatsapp message (only outbound) service for indie sellers/marketers who have small scale (daily under 50 messages to send) & might not have bandwidth to spend time onboarding to official Whatsapp Business API.A friend pointed me to his Calendly calendar & asked me if I can build an integration with Calendly where his prospect gets a Whatsapp message when they book a meeting with him. I was like - this can easily be done with Zapier. Only after building the entire Zap, I figured that Calendly expose webhooks ONLY in their paid plans.Since I had committed to my friend, I built a complete offline integration. The integration relied on capturing javascript event where the calendar is embedded. Most folks embed Calendly on their own website so this looked like a plausible work around for lack of webhook exposure from Calendly.I also had to build an oAuth app as the Calendly event payload contained only inviteeUrl & then I had to query the user's Calendly to get phone