Questions
Everything people ask before they join.
What Livnly is, what it does, and what happens to your calendar. If something you want to know is not here, write to [email protected] and it will be.
The basics
- What is Livnly?
- Livnly is a calendar app for iPhone and Mac, built for your life instead of your work. You type a plan the way you'd say it and it is scheduled in seconds. You plan with other people from a single link, with nothing for them to install. And your week reads in one look, colored by what it is for rather than which account it came from. It is a calendar, not a tracker.
- How is Livnly different from Google Calendar or Apple Calendar?
- Two things: speed, and other people. Every calendar you have used was built for work, so it is shaped around meetings, rooms and availability, and it is slow to use for anything that isn't one. In Livnly, adding something takes one sentence instead of seven fields, and planning a dinner with three friends takes one link instead of twenty messages. Livnly is not a replacement account either: it reads and writes the calendars your phone already has, Google and iCloud and Outlook included.
- Who is Livnly for?
- People whose calendar is mostly their life rather than mostly their job: the dinners, the training, the family things, the trip in three weeks, alongside the work that also has to fit. If you open your calendar many times a day and it has never once made anything easier, that is who it is for.
- What platforms does Livnly run on?
- Livnly runs on iPhone and Mac. There is no Android or Windows version, and no web app: Livnly reads the calendars the operating system already holds, so it lives where those calendars live. It is in closed alpha for now, which means invite only.
Planning and scheduling
- How do I add an event in Livnly?
- You type it the way you would say it. “Dinner with Sam and Alex next Thursday at 8” is the whole interaction: Livnly reads the sentence, works out the day, the time and who is coming, and puts the event where it belongs. There is no form with seven fields to fill in, and nothing to learn first. Dinner with friends, planned in about forty seconds.
- Can I plan something with other people?
- That is the half of a calendar nothing else does. You tap plan an evening and your free evenings are already on screen, or you type “lunch at 1” and every day that works is right there. Then you add whoever is coming to the event itself, straight from your contacts, and send them the plan as a link they can put in their own calendar.
- Do I need everyone’s email address to invite them?
- No, and that is the point. Every calendar before this one invites people by email address, which is fine at work, where you have the address of everyone you have ever been in a meeting with. It is useless for the rest of your life: you have your friends’ phone numbers in your contacts and almost none of their email addresses, so the tool that runs your evenings is built around the one detail you do not have. Livnly works from your contacts instead. You add the person, not an address.
- Can I invite a whole group at once?
- Yes. You can make groups out of your contacts, the five-a-side team, the book club, your family, and put the whole group on an event instead of picking the same six people every time. Everyone in the group lands on the plan and gets the link. Livnly also records who was on each plan at the time, so adding or removing someone from a group later does not rewrite who was at last month’s dinner.
- Do the people I invite need to install Livnly?
- No. What you send is a link. It opens in whatever browser they already have, shows them that one plan and nothing else of your week, and puts the event into their own calendar in a tap. No app to download, no account to create, no sign-up before they can answer you. This is the part that usually breaks, because a person who has to install something first simply does not answer you.
- Can Livnly stop my week from filling up?
- Yes, and it is the setting called Protect free evenings. You tell Livnly how many evenings a week you want to keep for yourself, from one to three, and it holds that many: the held evening is marked in the day and week views with a small “Held” chip so you can see it before you give it away. It is a hold, not a lock. You can still plan over it, deliberately, which is the whole difference between a calendar that helps and a calendar that argues with you.How protected evenings work
- Does Livnly help me remember birthdays?
- Livnly reads the birthdays your phone already knows, from the calendar your contacts feed, and shows them properly. Instead of a grey all-day bar that says “Verjaardag van Jan Jansen”, you see a cake and the name: Jan Jansen. It works in the language your phone is set to. Birthdays are all-day, so they never eat an evening when Livnly is looking for a slot to offer you, and they sit at the top of the day so the day you were about to double-book is the day you notice.
- What are the different ways to look at my calendar?
- Your week reads in one look, colored by what things are for rather than which account they came from, so work, family, training and Thursday's dinner are one picture instead of four feeds. There is a day view, a week view and a running list of what is actually next, plus a home-screen widget for the thing you keep unlocking your phone to check. Free time is drawn as free time rather than left as an absence, which is what makes an evening you could still use visible at all.
Your calendar and your data
- Do I have to move my calendars over to Livnly?
- No, and there is nothing to migrate or connect. Livnly reads the calendars your iPhone and Mac already have, through the permission you grant in iOS or macOS. If your Google, iCloud or Outlook accounts are already in your phone's Settings, they are already in Livnly. Anything you add in Livnly is written back to those same calendars, so it shows up everywhere else you look.
- Is my calendar data private?
- Your calendar stays on your device. Livnly is not a calendar service and keeps no copy of your week on its servers, so there is no database anywhere with your events in it. The one exception is named plainly: when you are signed in and type a plan in words, that sentence plus the titles and times already on that day are sent to a language-model provider so the sentence can be read. Never your notes, your guests or your locations. Livnly is paid for by the people who use it, never by advertisers, so your week is not the product.
- Does Livnly use AI?
- For one job: reading the sentence you typed and turning it into an event. That happens on your device first, and when you are signed in a language model checks the reading, which is the exception described above. Nothing else about Livnly is generated: it does not write your week for you, it does not score your days, and it never decides something on your behalf without showing you what it decided.
Getting in, and what it costs
- How do I get access to Livnly?
- Livnly is in closed alpha while it is being built: invite or referral only, and people are admitted in small batches, as many as one founder can welcome properly. You apply at livnly.com/apply, which is three questions and takes about a minute, and the founder reads every application himself.
- How much does Livnly cost?
- Nothing while Livnly is in closed alpha. There is no card to enter and nothing to cancel: what is asked instead is that you use it on a real week and say honestly what you think. Livnly is not free forever, though, and that is worth being plain about: when the public beta opens it becomes a paid subscription. What it will cost has not been decided yet and is announced at that launch. Alpha members are asked first and lock a founding price they keep for as long as they stay, and the closed alpha is the only door to it.
- Who makes Livnly?
- Livnly is built by Jensen Bernard and operated by JB CAPITAL BV, a company registered in Belgium (VAT BE 1005.101.429). It is a small, self-funded project rather than a venture-backed one, which is why the people using it get a vote on what gets built next and why it is paid for by them rather than by advertisers.
- How do I get help or contact Livnly?
- Email [email protected] and a person answers, usually the founder. For anything that is not support, [email protected] reaches the same place.
Livnly is in closed alpha on iOS & Mac: invite or referral only, and free while it's closed. Apply if you really want an invite.