Why we built this

Every product AKdev publishes starts the same way. Something we needed, where what already existed was priced well beyond what the job was worth, or was available and simply not very good. BusyWait is the calendar one.

Nobody chooses to have four calendars; they accumulate. A personal account, a work account, a client’s Workspace you were added to for one project and never removed from, and something Apple set up years ago that still has your dentist in it. Each one is right about part of your week and wrong about the rest, and the only thing reconciling them is you, holding two tabs open and hoping.

Every tool offering to fix that wanted something in return — a bot in the meeting, a summary nobody asked for, a model trained on the diary. The thing we actually wanted was smaller: make the calendars agree about when you are busy, and then stop.

It is a satisfying kind of software to build, for an unfashionable reason. The problem has a precise shape, the correct behaviour is obvious once it is written down, and success looks like nothing happening. There is no engagement to increase and no surface to bolt an assistant onto. A background service that quietly stops being noticed is a finished thing, which is rarer than it ought to be.

Why busy is the default

Any sync tool has to decide what a mirrored event carries, and most of them decide “all of it, unless you say otherwise”. That is defensible for one person mirroring two of their own calendars. It stops being defensible the moment a client’s calendar is involved, because the setting that protects you is one you have to know exists, find and keep correct for every sync you ever add.

So the floor here is a start, an end and the word busy, and everything above that floor is a switch you find and flip for one specific sync. It is the same on the free plan as on the paid ones. The whole field list is published, including what it does not protect you from.

Who builds it

BusyWait is built and published by AKdev Ltd, a small independent software studio registered in Scotland, Companies House number SC892925. It is not venture funded and there is no second revenue line. The subscriptions are the business, which is why the privacy policy can promise there is nothing here to sell.

Small cuts both ways and it is worth saying which ways. Support reaches the people who build the product rather than a tier of it, so answers tend to be direct and reasonably quick. It also means work happens in an order rather than in parallel, and a request that would be a sprint somewhere larger may simply be a no here. If what you need is a platform with a roadmap and an account manager, that is a legitimate requirement and this is not it.

What happens to your data

What BusyWait stores, field by field, is on one page. Blocks already written to your calendars are ordinary events, so they stay where they are whatever happens to us. What we commit to when a sync fails, and if BusyWait is ever wound down, is on the reliability page.

Retention, deletion and export are governed by AKdev’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, which cover every app it publishes. If BusyWait were ever discontinued you would be given notice and a window to take everything with you — that commitment lives in the Terms rather than only on this page.

Getting in touch

The contact form reaches us directly, or email hello@busywait.ai. AKdev’s wider work is at ak.dev.