Combining multiple calendars: what the free tier covers

Price pages for calendar tools are hard to compare side by side. One charges per connected calendar, one per seat, one once and never again, and a fourth is free with limits buried in a feature grid. Before any of that matters, a more basic question needs an answer: does combining these particular calendars require paying anyone at all?

Often it does not. This guide walks through the layers from the bottom up. First the free capability already built into Google, Microsoft and Apple. Then where the free tiers of third-party tools stop. Then how the paid options meter their prices, and what has happened to some of the vendors. All prices and limits below were taken from each company's public pricing or help pages in September 2026.

Know which job is being paid for

"Combining calendars" covers three different jobs, and they cost very different amounts.

• Viewing. Several accounts drawn on one screen. The events stay where they are; an app reads them and lays them out.
• Blocking. When an event lands in one calendar, a busy block appears in another, so colleagues or booking pages see the time as taken.
• Copying. Full event details duplicated into a second account and kept there.

Viewing is cheap because nothing has to run while the laptop is closed. Blocking and copying are different. Some server has to watch one calendar around the clock and write to another, and that ongoing work is what most subscriptions pay for.

A quick test identifies the job. If the pain is not seeing the whole day in one place, the job is viewing. If people keep booking over personal commitments, the job is blocking. If the goal is an archive of events in a single account, the job is copying.

Copying deserves a second look before anyone pays for it. If the need is a record of past events, a one-time export and import does the job for free. If the need is a live duplicate of future events with full titles and descriptions, that is the most demanding of the three jobs, and it also moves the most private information between accounts. Before paying for it, check whether blocking, which moves only the fact that time is taken and never the event's title or notes, would already cover the underlying need.

The free layer that already exists

For viewing, and in one case for blocking, the big platforms already provide a lot at no extra charge.

• Calendar on the Mac accepts Google, iCloud, Exchange and other accounts and overlays them in one window.
• Google Calendar sharing lets one account display another account's calendar, as long as the owner grants access and, for work accounts, the administrator allows it.
• Outlook.com and Outlook on the web can subscribe to any published .ics address.
• Notion Calendar is offered free according to its product page, connects Google, Outlook and iCloud calendars, and has apps for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.

The most useful free option for people with a Microsoft 365 job and a personal Google account is easy to miss.

You can connect one Outlook.com or Google account to your work or school account. Source: support.microsoft.com

The same page says this also lets the personal calendar count toward the availability shown to people scheduling with the user. That is blocking, for free, within limits: one personal account, and only in Outlook on the web.

Free routes come with structural trade-offs rather than paywalls. Subscriptions refresh slowly; Microsoft says Outlook on the web updates roughly every 6 hours and sometimes takes more than 24. Sharing depends on permissions and policy. Importing a file is free too, but Google's help makes clear that imported events do not stay in sync, so it is a one-time copy, not a connection.

Where free tiers stop

Third-party tools that offer a permanent free plan draw the line in different places.

Reclaim.ai Lite is free and allows 2 connected calendars and 1 calendar sync. The service works with Google and Outlook calendars. Two accounts kept in step with busy blocks fit inside the free plan. A third account, or a second sync rule, moves the user to a paid tier.

Fantastical has a free version that works with existing calendars. Its pricing page feature grid puts some limits on it. Calendar mirroring, described as mirroring events from one calendar to another, covers a range of 2 weeks on the free version and 6 months on Premium. Push sync, which reflects changes across devices in real time, is listed as a Premium feature.

OneCal, CalendarBridge and Morgen do not list a permanent free plan. They offer trials instead. OneCal gives 14 days with no credit card required. CalendarBridge also starts its trial without a card. Morgen offers a 14-day trial with no card and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Getting a real answer out of a two-week trial

A trial only settles the price question if it is used on the real setup, not a test account. On the first day, connect the exact accounts that will be used in practice, including the work account, since that is the one most likely to be refused by an administrator policy. A refusal on day one costs nothing. A refusal after an annual payment costs a year.

Next, create a handful of test events in each source calendar and watch where they land. Check three things: how quickly the busy block appears on the other side, what a colleague sees when opening that block, and what happens to the block when the original event is moved or deleted. Those three observations answer most of the questions a pricing page cannot.

Finally, before the trial ends, find out how to disconnect. Look in the service's help pages for what happens to the blocks it created when an account is removed: whether they are deleted automatically or have to be cleared by hand. Knowing the answer in advance avoids a calendar full of orphaned "busy" entries if the decision is not to continue.

What the paid plans cost

The table lists the published prices in US dollars. Fantastical is left out of the table because no US dollar figure could be confirmed on its pricing page at the time of checking; its Individual, Family and Team plans all carry a 14-day trial, and the Family plan covers up to 5 members.

Service	Meter	Price	What is included
OneCal	Per user, billed annually	Starter $60/yr, Essential $120/yr, Premium $300/yr	2, 5 or 50 calendars
CalendarBridge	Per user	Basic $5/mo ($4/mo annually), Premium $10/mo ($8), Pro $40/mo ($32)	2, 5 or 8 calendars
Reclaim.ai	Per seat	Starter $12/mo ($10/mo annually), Business $18/mo ($15)	3 syncs, or unlimited
Morgen	Per user	Pro $30/mo, or $15/mo billed yearly	Unlimited calendar integrations
BusyCal	One-time	$49.99	18 months of updates

Annual discounts differ as much as the base prices. CalendarBridge and Reclaim.ai both state 20 percent. OneCal describes its annual plans as two months free. Morgen's yearly Pro plan is half the monthly rate. A large annual discount is also a larger commitment if the tool stops fitting after a few months.

Three ways the bill is metered

Per connected calendar. OneCal and CalendarBridge step up in price as calendars are added. Both label the unit "Calendars", not accounts. Someone whose work account holds a personal calendar plus two team calendars should confirm during the trial how those are counted before choosing a tier.

Per seat. Reclaim.ai, Morgen and Fantastical charge per person. Adding calendars does not raise the price, but the price includes features beyond sync, such as automatic scheduling or booking pages. That is good value when those features are wanted and dead weight when they are not.

One-time. BusyCal's licensing page describes a perpetual license with 18 months of free updates. Renewal is currently $39.99. Without renewal, the installed version keeps working indefinitely, and one registration code covers all of the buyer's Macs, including family members' machines.

Totals over three years, at annual rates, make the difference concrete: OneCal Starter comes to $180, CalendarBridge Basic to $144, Morgen Pro to $540. These are not like-for-like products, so the figures show the size of the commitment rather than which one is cheaper for the same job.

Which combinations trigger a bill

The accounts involved decide more than the tool does.

Accounts	Viewing	Blocking
Two personal Google accounts	Free through sharing or a desktop app	Free within Reclaim.ai Lite
Microsoft 365 work plus one personal Google	Free	Free in Outlook on the web, one personal account
Work plus two or more personal accounts	Free	Paid sync service
Any combination that includes iCloud	Free on the Mac or in Notion Calendar	Paid; Reclaim.ai does not list iCloud

iCloud narrows the field. OneCal and CalendarBridge both list iCloud support, while Reclaim.ai lists Google and Outlook. Every third-party connection to iCloud uses an app-specific password, and Apple revokes all of them automatically when the main Apple Account password is changed, which is worth knowing before relying on any iCloud sync.

Costs that never appear on a price page

Some of the real cost of combining calendars is time rather than money, and it is worth counting before comparing dollar figures.

Approval time. In many organizations, connecting a work calendar to an outside service requires an administrator to approve the app. The subscription may be $5 a month, but a request that sits in an IT queue for two weeks delays the whole setup, and a refusal makes the subscription worthless.

Credential upkeep. Any tool connected to iCloud relies on an app-specific password. Apple's support page notes that an account can hold up to 25 of them and that changing the main Apple Account password revokes them all. After every password change, each connected tool needs a new one.

Overlap between tools. It is common to pay for a sync service and, separately, for a calendar app that has its own mirroring or scheduling features. Before adding a second paid tool, check whether the one already paid for covers the same job. Fantastical's Premium tier, for example, includes calendar mirroring, and Reclaim.ai includes scheduling links even on its free plan.

Leaving. Disconnecting a sync service is rarely a single click in practice. Blocks may need clearing, sharing permissions granted during setup may need revoking, and booking links that point at the old service need replacing. None of this is billed, but it belongs in the comparison.

Vendor changes are part of the cost

With a subscription, the price is only half the risk. If the service ends, the cost is finding a replacement and rebuilding every sync rule. Facts confirmed as of September 2026:

• Clockwise announced on its website that the product would no longer be available starting March 27, 2026.
• Reclaim.ai announced in August 2024 that it was joining Dropbox. Its pricing page still presents it as a standalone service.
• Notion Calendar is the product formerly called Cron; the renaming was announced on January 17, 2024.

A perpetual license behaves differently. If a developer stops shipping updates, the installed app keeps running. What it cannot do is follow later changes made by Google or Apple on their side. Whether a subscription or a one-time purchase costs less over time depends on how many years the tool will be used and whether continued updates matter.

What to change first

List every calendar that needs to be combined, counted as individual calendars rather than accounts, and decide whether the job is viewing, blocking or copying. If it is viewing, try the free layer for a week before paying anyone. If it is blocking, run a card-free trial with the exact account mix, since a work administrator can block the connection regardless of plan. To compare how desktop calendar apps handle accounts and pricing, see the comparison page, or check the license terms for Caltimate.