Clockwise Shut Down in March 2026
Start here, because a large share of the "best AI scheduling tools 2026" articles currently ranking still recommend a product you cannot sign up for.
Clockwise announced that its team was joining Salesforce and that the product stopped being available on 27 March 2026. All Focus Time blocks, Smart Hold events and Scheduling Links were removed, and user data was deleted shortly after. Prepaid subscribers received prorated refunds. Clockwise itself pointed departing customers at Reclaim, with price matching and migration support.
If you are evaluating tools from a listicle, check the publication date and then check whether the product still exists. In this category that is not a hypothetical concern — the market consolidated hard this year, and a lot of published advice has not caught up.
Motion Has No Free Plan
Motion dominates searches for AI scheduling that automatically defends focus blocks, and it is a capable product. It is not, and has not been, free.
Current pricing is $19 per seat per month for Pro AI and $29 per seat per month for Business AI, with annual billing advertised at a 33% saving. Both tiers run on a credit system — 7,500 monthly AI credits on Pro, 15,000 on Business — with additional credits sold at roughly 25 cents per 100 on Pro and 19 cents per 100 on Business.
There is a trial, but no permanent free tier. Worth flagging because several roundups describe Motion's pricing as "$29/month or $19 billed annually", conflating two separate plans into one. Those are two different products at two different capability levels, and reading it wrong means budgeting for the wrong thing across a whole team.
Reclaim Lite — Free, and Capped at One User Best Genuinely Free
Reclaim's Lite plan is free forever with no time limit, and it is more generous than most free tiers in this category. It includes 5 AI Agents covering Focus Time, Habits, Buffer Time, Smart Meetings and Meeting Quality — the core of what an AI calendar is supposed to do. You also get 1 calendar sync, 1 scheduling link, and integrations with Google Tasks, Slack, Zoom and Google Meet.
Now the part that matters for anyone searching for a team tool: the free plan is limited to a one-user team. Not a small team. One person. Team features — shared availability, delegated access, an out-of-office calendar — begin on paid plans at $10 per seat per month for Starter, $15 for Business and $22 for Enterprise, with yearly billing saving 20%.
So the honest framing is that Reclaim Lite is an excellent free tool for an individual on a remote team, not a free tool for a remote team. Every person can run their own instance, which gets you most of the practical benefit, but nobody sees anyone else's optimised calendar.
The One-Week Range Is the Real Limit
Buried in the plan comparison is the constraint that actually shapes daily use: the free tier optimises across a one-week scheduling range. Paid tiers extend that to 8 weeks on Starter and 12 on Business.
In practice this means Reclaim will defend your focus time and reschedule your habits within the next seven days, and will not plan beyond that. For reactive work — a week of meetings that keeps shifting — seven days is plenty. For anything planned on a sprint or monthly cadence, the AI simply stops looking before your horizon starts.
This is the single most useful number to know before you invest an afternoon in setup, and it is the one most reviews omit entirely. If your work runs in two-week sprints, the free tier will feel broken rather than limited, and the fix is a paid plan rather than a different tool.
Cal.com — Free Forever, Open Source No Seat Limit
Cal.com solves the other half of the problem. It is open source, free forever, and unlike Reclaim's free tier it does not cap you at unlimited event types or calendar connections. It is the strongest free answer to "we need booking links for the whole team without paying Calendly per seat".
Be clear about what it is not. Cal.com handles booking — letting people claim slots in your availability. It does not do AI calendar optimisation: it will not move your focus blocks around a new meeting or protect a habit. It is the scheduling-link layer, not the AI layer.
Because it is open source you can also self-host it, which puts availability data on infrastructure you control — the same reasoning that applies to self-hosting automation tools when the data is sensitive.
What a Free Team Setup Actually Looks Like
Since no single free product covers a team, the working answer is two tools:
- Cal.com for shared booking links, at team scale, free.
- Reclaim Lite installed individually by each person who wants focus-time protection, free per person, within their own one-week window.
- Notion Calendar if you want a free unified view across Google Calendars, though it performs no AI optimisation of its own.
That combination costs nothing and covers most of what a small remote team needs. What it does not give you is the shared layer — seeing collective availability, moving meetings to protect everyone's focus time at once. That capability is genuinely paywalled across every vendor in this category, and no amount of stacking free tiers reproduces it.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Free Tier | Team on Free? | Paid From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reclaim Lite | 5 AI agents, 1-week range | No — 1 user | $10/seat/mo |
| Cal.com | Unlimited event types | Yes | Optional |
| Notion Calendar | Free, no AI planning | Yes | Free |
| Motion | None — trial only | No | $19/seat/mo |
| Clockwise | Shut down 27 Mar 2026 | — | — |
Which Should You Use?
- One person wanting protected focus time, free: Reclaim Lite, accepting the one-week horizon.
- Booking links for a whole team, free: Cal.com. No seat cost, and self-hostable.
- Work planned in sprints: the free one-week range will not reach your horizon — budget for Reclaim Starter at $10/seat or stay with manual planning.
- Shared team availability and cross-calendar optimisation: genuinely paid across every vendor. Do not spend a weekend trying to assemble it from free tiers.
- Still evaluating Clockwise: it does not exist. Check the date on whatever article sent you there.
One habit worth adopting before any of this: audit where the time actually goes for two weeks before automating. AI schedulers optimise the calendar you already have, and a calendar full of meetings that should have been messages gets optimised into a slightly tidier version of the same problem. A pass through our guide to automating repetitive tasks for free will remove more hours than a scheduler will rearrange.