DotCal

I’ve been building DotCal, an Android calendar and task planner focused on something I felt was missing from many modern productivity apps: a simple calendar that actually helps you plan your time without requiring everything to live in the cloud.

DotCal started from a pretty simple idea — I wanted a calendar that felt clean, fast and private, while still having the planning features that usually require several different apps.

So instead of building another calendar with endless settings, I’ve been trying to build something around a few principles:

• Offline-first
• Privacy-first
• Minimal UI
• Smart time planning
• Useful sharing without requiring an account

The interface is also heavily inspired by the Nothing OS design language. I like the minimal, monochrome aesthetic and wanted to bring that feeling to a calendar without making it feel like a copy of the system UI.

What can DotCal actually do?

The basic calendar covers the things you'd expect — events, recurring events, reminders, holidays, birthdays, multiple calendars, Day/Week/Month/Year/Agenda views, search, widgets and tasks.

But the part I've been more interested in is what happens after you put your events on the calendar.

DotCal includes a Dead Time Finder that looks for available blocks in your schedule so you can actually find time for something instead of manually scanning your calendar.

There are also Pencil-In / Ghost Events, which let you put tentative plans on the calendar without treating them exactly like confirmed events.

Smart Quick Add goes beyond simply parsing “meeting tomorrow at 3.” It can also handle commands such as moving an event, changing its duration, changing its location, adding/removing reminders, deleting an event, or creating preparation time around an existing event.

I wanted these interactions to remain local rather than turning the calendar into another cloud AI product.

There are also some features I've built specifically around sharing:

QR Event Sharing lets you share an event without needing the other person to have an account, while the Availability Text Generator makes it easier to share when you're free.

For people who work with shifts, DotCal also has Shift Patterns and related planning tools.

On the privacy side, DotCal is designed to work offline and keeps calendar intelligence on the device. Calendar analytics, for example, don't need to leave the phone. Calendar synchronization is handled through Android's CalendarProvider rather than requiring a DotCal cloud account.

I've also added things like Calendar Sets, Templates, Countdowns/D-Day, bulk editing, drag-and-drop rescheduling, import/export, backup/restore, Private Vault and App Lock.

And I'm trying to keep the free version useful instead of turning the calendar into a paywall with a few buttons.

The business model

DotCal has a free version with optional Pro features. I'm experimenting with both monthly/yearly subscriptions and a one-time lifetime Pro purchase.

I'm building DotCal as an indie developer, so I'm still learning which features people actually value and which ones only sound good on paper.

That's probably the most interesting part of building it for me — seeing how people actually use the product and deciding what deserves to be built next.

I'm especially interested in feedback from other indie hackers:

What would make you switch from your current calendar to something like DotCal?

Is it privacy? Better time planning? The offline-first approach? The UI? Or are there features you think a modern calendar should have that most calendar apps still get wrong?

I'm happy to hear both positive and brutally honest feedback.