OPEN-SOURCE · NEW YORK FIRST
An open calendar of everything happening.
Event feeds for your city, curated by people who actually go out. Subscribe in any calendar app. The curators and hosts behind them get paid.
- FRI6P Jazz at the BandshellProspect Park · ★ Mara & Dev are going Free
- SAT8P Kris Davis at the VanguardVillage Vanguard, West Village $40
- SUN3:30 Parlor Jazz at Marjorie Eliot’s555 Edgecombe Ave, Harlem Free
Every calendar is a page, a feed, and an API. The first one is live: Ted’s NYC →
Starting in New York. New Orleans next.
A handful of genuinely great, hand-curated NYC calendars with live feeds, before anything else. New Orleans follows. Anywhere else — the code is open, run when.org for your own town.
Events are trapped in silos.
What’s happening tonight in your city is scattered across Meetup, Facebook, Eventbrite, venue websites, and a hundred Instagram stories. Each one is a closed destination that holds listings hostage to its own growth. None of them answer the simple question: what’s going on around here?
when.org is the open alternative. The unit isn’t an app or an account — it’s a calendar with an owner. A person who knows every jazz room in New York publishes a calendar, and you subscribe the way you’d subscribe to a newsletter. It shows up in the calendar app you already use, and it stays current.
Feeds are free forever. Reading is free. Publishing is free. Subscribing your calendar app is free. Data out is sacred: every page carries open standards, so nothing you build here is ever locked in.
The platform is free, but curators can sell calendar subscriptions, tickets, tips. Think of it as a Substack for calendars — free, or if it’s good enough, paid.
Every calendar is four things at once
Publish once. It’s instantly useful everywhere — no exporting, no re-posting, no lock-in.
A web page
A clean public page anyone can visit and share — and every event has its own link.
A calendar feed
Subscribe once in Apple or Google Calendar and every update flows in automatically.
An API
Structured, open data for apps, researchers — and your personal AI. No key to read.
An email digest
The week ahead, written by the curator, delivered to subscribers who want it.
The people who make the scene should make money.
Offer a paid tier on your calendar: premium picks, early access, the weekly digest. You keep 90%. Nobody else pays taste-makers for knowing their city.
Sell tickets and paid RSVPs natively for about a 1% platform fee plus card processing. The big ticketing platforms charge six times that. On free events, guests can tip you.
Embed your own calendar on your website free, and claim your venue page so every listing points home. Pro tools for branding and analytics come later.
when.org only earns when you do: a small share of payments, never a paywall on the feed itself.
Be there when it starts.
Join the waitlist and we’ll write when the first New York calendars go live. If you curate, host, or run a room, we want to hear from you first.
