LettuceMeet, Rallly, and Schej — Great Tools, Wrong Problem for Recurring Groups

LettuceMeet, Rallly, and Schej are all genuinely good scheduling tools. They’re free, well-designed, and a real improvement on the clunky incumbents they were built to replace. If you’ve outgrown Doodle or When2Meet and you’re looking for something cleaner, any of these three are worth trying.

The catch is that they share the same fundamental design assumption: the event you’re scheduling happens once. And if your group meets every week, that assumption turns a scheduling tool into a weekly chore.

LettuceMeet

LettuceMeet is a cleaner, more modern take on the When2Meet grid. You create an event, share a link, and your participants drag to fill in when they’re free. The overlap highlights automatically. The UI is significantly better than When2Meet, especially on mobile, and the whole thing requires no accounts from respondents.

Where it falls short for recurring groups: it’s entirely event-based. Each LettuceMeet poll is a standalone object. There’s no concept of a group that keeps meeting. No minimum headcount. No automatic rollover to next week. Every cycle, someone has to create a new event, generate a new link, and share it again. The tool has no memory of what came before.

Rallly

Rallly takes a slightly different approach: instead of a drag-select grid, it presents specific date options that participants vote on. It’s well-designed, open source, and free. For a situation where you have a handful of fixed candidate dates and want to find the one that works best for everyone, it’s excellent.

The recurring group problem is the same. Rallly is built around polls, and every poll is a one-off event. You propose dates, people vote, you pick the winner — and then you start over next time. There’s no persistent group, no standing constraints, no automation.

Schej

Schej is aimed at students and friend groups and does something interesting: it connects to Google Calendar to pull in actual busy/free times rather than requiring manual grid entry. That reduces the input friction significantly. The visual overlap display is clear.

But it’s still event-based. You create an event for a specific occasion, collect calendar-synced availability, find a time, done. For the group that needs to do this every week without recreating the event each time, Schej doesn’t solve the persistence problem. Each event still starts fresh.

The common thread: they’re all event tools, not group tools

LettuceMeet, Rallly, and Schej are all built around the event as the primary object. You create an event, find a time, and the tool’s job is done. The group that will attend the event is incidental — they’re just respondents to a poll.

For a recurring group, the group is the primary object. The event is just this week’s instance of an ongoing thing. A tool built for recurring groups needs to model the group itself — its members, its constraints, its history — and produce a new event instance each week without anyone having to start from scratch.

What you actually need if your group meets regularly

• A persistent group. Members join once and stay enrolled. No new invite link every week.
• Standing constraints. Your minimum headcount — “we need at least 5” — should be set once and respected automatically every cycle.
• Ten-second availability input. Each week, members tap the days they’re free. Not a grid to drag. Not a Google Calendar sync to authorise. Two taps.
• Automatic best-day surfacing. The app should identify which day has the strongest overlap and flag whether you’ve hit your minimum — without requiring human interpretation.
• Automated rollover. The next week’s scheduling cycle starts without anyone doing anything. No new poll to create.

How Toss-up works instead

Toss-up models the group, not the event. You set up your crew once: name, minimum headcount, invite link. Members join with just an email — no password. From that point, the weekly loop is:

Everyone taps their free days for the week (ten seconds). Toss-up identifies the best overlap. The admin confirms with one tap. Everyone gets notified.

Then it resets automatically for next week. No new poll. No new link. No chase.

LettuceMeet, Rallly, and Schej vs Toss-up

When LettuceMeet, Rallly, or Schej are still the right choice

All three are excellent for what they were designed for. If you need to find a date for a one-off event — a group dinner, a workshop, a team outing — any of them will work well, and all are free. Schej in particular is worth recommending for any group already using Google Calendar, since it reduces availability input to essentially zero effort.

Use Toss-up when the group itself is the long-term thing you’re managing. If you’ve used LettuceMeet three weeks in a row for the same crew, you’re using an event tool to manage a group problem — and there’s a better fit.