What the free plugin does

The free plugin, in the WordPress.org directory, is a finished product rather than a demo with the good parts removed. You create events in WordPress, with a title, description, image, location, organiser and categories. Each one carries a local wall-clock time, a length, and its own IANA timezone — so an event you wrote as “19:00 in Copenhagen” stays 19:00 in Copenhagen even when the clocks change and even when someone reads the page from Chicago.

Recurring events are free, and they are complete: intervals, counts, end dates, ordinal weekdays like “the last Friday”, monthly days, yearly months, set positions, and cancelled dates. So are single-occurrence exceptions — move or cancel one Tuesday without touching the other fifty-one. There is a month grid, a list view, a block, a shortcode, and an outgoing iCal feed your visitors can subscribe to in their own calendar app.

A venue with a quiz night every other Tuesday never needs to pay us anything. That is deliberate.

What Pro adds

Pro is for the case where your events already live somewhere else. Most venues and gyms do not type their schedule into WordPress — it is in Google Calendar, in Outlook or Microsoft 365, in Teamup, in Nextcloud, on somebody's iPhone. Pro subscribes to those calendars over their standard .ics feed and keeps the site in step, so the website stops being a second place to type everything.

There is no API key to create, no OAuth screen, no account with us, and no quota. Google, Outlook, iCloud and the rest all publish a secret .ics address for a private calendar; you paste that address in, and that is the whole setup.

Pro also shows you the thing every other calendar hides: when it last synced, what changed, and what failed. A calendar that has quietly stopped updating looks exactly like a calendar with no events coming up — and that mistake is the single most common complaint in this category.

What you are actually paying for

Everything we write is GPL, which means anyone may legally take the Pro code and resell it. That is not a hole in the plan; it is WordPress. So the subscription does not buy you code that nobody else can have. It buys the work that has to keep happening: the timezone database changes twice a year and countries move their own rules by law, Google and Microsoft shift their calendar formats, and PHP and WordPress deprecate what the code stands on. Somebody has to watch all four. A copy of the code watches none of them, which is why a copied calendar freezes on a date in the future and stays there.

Alongside that: updates delivered into your WordPress admin, and a person to write to. See what Pro costs →

Three things it deliberately does not do

It does not sell tickets. Ticketing is where event plugins accumulate their worst bugs and their security advisories, and bolting a checkout onto a calendar makes both worse. This is a calendar.

It does not write a database row for every occurrence. A weekly class over two years is one event with a rule, not 104 posts cluttering every query on your site. Occurrences are worked out when the page is drawn.

It does no work on pages that have no calendar on them. Nothing is hooked globally. Load your front page with Query Monitor open and the plugin costs you two autoloaded options and nothing else.