New SMS opt-in requirement has made Workflows unreliable — is Calendly considering an alternative?

I’m creating a new thread because there are already multiple posts from customers dealing with the same problem, and this deserves more visibility.

SMS Workflows are one of the main reasons we pay for Calendly. We rely on texts because email notifications get missed or filtered to spam, and SMS is what allows clients to actually see appointment notifications and confirm attendance.

Calendly changed that by adding a separate SMS opt-in/verification step after the appointment is scheduled. If the client misses that message, doesn’t recognize it, or doesn’t complete the extra step, the SMS Workflows we are paying for simply do not reach them.

That is not a small change. It materially reduces the usefulness of a paid feature.

What makes it worse is that I received no meaningful advance notice. This happened right around our annual renewal. Had we been told ahead of time that a major part of our workflow was about to change, we could have evaluated alternatives before renewing or migrated before it disrupted our business.

I contacted Support and was essentially told this is how it works now, there is no alternative, and even a refund is not guaranteed.

So what exactly is the expectation here?

Are customers supposed to continue paying Calendly and then also pay another company for texting because Calendly made its own SMS Workflows unreliable?

There are obvious alternatives to this implementation. Add SMS consent to the booking terms with a checkbox. Allow consent when someone is booked on behalf of a client. Send a recognizable two-way text asking the client to reply YES to receive appointment messages and STOP to opt out. Instead, Calendly chose a separate, non-customizable verification step that clients may not even understand is connected to their appointment.

If I now have to move the texting portion of my workflow to another provider anyway, it becomes very difficult to justify continuing to pay Calendly for scheduling when basic scheduling can be handled through Google or another service.

This is not one customer complaining about a minor inconvenience. There are multiple threads from paying customers saying the same change disrupted workflows they relied on.

Calendly made the change. Calendly should provide a workable alternative instead of telling customers to live with it, find a workaround, or possibly get a refund.

What is Calendly actually planning to do about this?