kaien is built and maintained by me, in Pune.
I run a small business out of Pune. For years, my scheduling lived in a chaotic mix of Google Calendar links, WhatsApp threads, and the occasional Calendly free trial that I'd let lapse because the paid tier (at roughly ₹830 a month, in dollars) felt like a foreign-currency luxury for a single-person workflow.
Most Indian solo professionals I know have the same setup. The result is hours every week lost to back-and-forth scheduling, and a steady trickle of meetings that happen at the wrong time, in the wrong tool, or not at all.
Kaien is the booking app I wanted: priced in rupees, GST-compliant, with a free tier that's actually generous and a paid tier that costs ₹199 a month. No US pricing converted to INR with a sigh. No artificial gates on basic features. No US sales-team workflows masquerading as defaults.
It's not the most-featured scheduler in the world. It probably never will be. But it's the one I use every day, and the one a few thousand other people might want.
The name comes from the Japanese kanji 海援. 海 means ocean. 援 means to aid or support. Together they read roughly as ‘aid offered across water’ — the act of helping someone reach you, despite distance.
A meeting is a small version of that idea. Two people, in different rooms, agreeing to meet. The product is the small kindness of making that easier.
More on the visual influences and design philosophy in the design notes.
Email is best: founder@getkaien.com. I read everything personally and reply within a day or two. For bug reports or feature requests, that same email works. There's no sales team, no support tier, no chatbot. Just me.