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Squarespace Acquires Acuity: What does this mean for users?

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Today (April 23, 2019) Squarespace announced that they acquired popular scheduler Acuity (which I have used for years and love for how flexible it is). You can read the announcement here. What does this mean for Acuity and Squarespace customers?

Well, it’s hard to prognosticate, but here’s what we know.

 Acuity’s new homepage, now more Squarespace-y! Acuity’s new homepage, now more Squarespace-y!

1. New Squarespace users, as of today, no longer have access to a free Emerging Entrepreneur plan.

I had suspected something was up as I’d seen reports of the freebie not working. So, if you’re new to Acuity, you’ll need to make do with the most basic plan or pay for the next tier. I recommend a paid plan if paid consultations are in your business plan—it’ll pay for itself.

2. Eventually, we expect to see deeper integration with Squarespace.

Squarespace is notoriously slow at development, so I would never try to guess at the when, but since their competitors Wix and Square-owned Weebly both offer robust appointments integrated into their systems, it will have to happen to stay competitive.

3. I’m not one to bet, but if I were, I would put my money on Squarespace making Acuity an add-on akin to their new Campaigns system for email marketing.

Add-on upsells are the trend with software as a service (SaaS) companies, so this would be in alignment with those trends. I wouldn’t venture a guess as to how the pricing would work, as Squarespace typically has oddly confusing pricing and does a lot of experiments and tests.

4. Acuity is now subject to Squarespace’s terms of service.

This is a small, but important thing, so it’s crucial to make sure that you’ve read and are okay with their ToS. A lot of people don’t read the new terms and just click okay, and it makes me sad!

5. It’s possible that Squarespace will now be friendlier to medical practitioners.

This is a stretch, but a big hole in Squarespace’s system is that forms and such are not HIPAA compliant. Acuity, on the other hand, is compliant at its top tier, and has BAA agreements with medical customers. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. (if you currently use Acuity for your medical practice, your BAA agreement will now be with Squarespace, so it’s wise to inquire about what that means).

6. There are alternatives out there, if Acuity isn’t the right solution or is too pricey, you may be wise to look around.

I like terribly-named Book Like a Boss quite a bit (you can set up subscriptions, classes and more through it, much like Acuity, but it also creates a nifty standalone website for you as well).

Calendly is tried and true and great if you don’t need to take payments—use the free tier and you’ll likely be happy if your needs are simple. The clean interface can be very appealing.

Whatever you do, we always recommend weighing the pros and cons of what I call “walled gardens.”

This is all of your business tools living in one place. While this can be tremendously convenient and valuable, especially for busy folks, it can also be problematic for some consumers, as your business is subject to the whims of the owner of all of your business applications. There’s not a wrong or right choice, it’s all about finding what feels good in your business, for your needs.

Have more questions? Drop a note in the comments and we’ll respond!

Update 4/25 – Ty from Acuity commented to note that Acuity is hosting a town hall on May 3, 2019 – https://app.livestorm.co/acuity-scheduling-1/town-hall

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7 Responses

  1. Hi, Ty from Acuity Scheduling here. First off, great write up!

    We have a lot of questions from folks and it’s important to us that these questions are addressed. I do want to emphasize that Gavin’s vision for Acuity has always been how we can better help folks. I’ve never met a leader that cares less about finances—all he wants to talk about is how many appointments you and your business are able to schedule through Acuity. It’s totally refreshing.

    Anyway (and Sarah, feel free to strike this part if it’s to promote-y because that’s not our intent), we have a digital town hall on May 3 with Gavin where he will talk about why he thinks Squarespace is the right place for Acuity to move in order to be able to help you more.

    I invite you to attend: https://app.livestorm.co/acuity-scheduling-1/town-hall

    Sarah, if you could come as well and write your take on Gavin’s town hall, that would be awesome.

    1. Hi Ty! I have absolutely LOVED my entire experience with Acuity–I sure hope that you folks are able to maintain the integrity of your vision now that it’s no longer independent. Sadly, oftentimes when companies are purchased by larger companies that have heavily leveraged VC funding, we see that that is hard to maintain due to investor pressures. 🙁

      I’ll add a note about your town hall to my post in case readers are interested! Thanks so much for weighing in!

    2. I actually want to add something to this, that’s actually pretty painful for myself and others who are original Squarespace experts. Many of us feel extremely hurt by the company not only turning their backs on the establishing pro community, but by taking steps to actively harm us by encouraging their customers to use an abusive, unethical platform (99designs) instead of working with experienced, intelligent, quality experts and removing their experts listings, therefore doing harm to our businesses, despite our year long discussions with them about this. It’s VERY hard to trust Squarespace at their word, due to this history.

  2. Acuity promises that the acquisition will not hurt us but it has. I absolutely LOVED using Acuity and signed up SS because of Acuity on the 24th April. I had the form to get an emerging account free bookmarked and today I finally finished my SS site and ready to add Acuity. Went to fill out the form and it returned a 404 error. How extremely disappointing when we were promised nothing changes.

    I will be leaving both SS and Acuity.

    1. Hi Susan! I would definitely reach out to Squarespace and explain what happened. If you don’t get results, ask them to escalate the ticket. Your request seems very reasonable to me.

  3. I have clients all over the world and mostly things go smoothly using PayPal. Now that square has purchased acuity will they be changing everyone over to square onlyl?

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