A free Cozi alternative without the 30-day limit or the yearly fee

In May 2024, Cozi limited its free calendar to a 30-day window and added ads. If you want to see anything further out, or look back at what happened last month, you need Cozi Gold.

Cozi Gold costs $39/year, billed annually, with no cheaper free equivalent (cozi.com/cozi-gold). That's the wall people are searching their way around.

A 30-day window sounds generous until you actually plan around it. A kid's end-of-semester schedule, a summer trip booked in February, a recurring appointment set six weeks out, all of that falls outside the free window the moment you try to look at it. The ads on top of that window are the second complaint, and they showed up the same month the window did. Neither change is reversible on the free plan: there's no setting to bring back the full calendar or turn off the ads without paying for Gold.

Junto's calendar has no time window at all. Past events and future events are all there, all the time, for free, for every calendar on the product. There are no ads on any Junto calendar.

The only payment on Junto, ever, is a one-time $4.99 plus tax, and it only applies once a private calendar passes 8 members. Public calendars have no member limit and are free regardless, no matter how large the group gets. There's no subscription, and nothing renews.

That one-time structure is the actual, meaningful difference from Cozi Gold, not just the dollar amount. $39/year is a bill that comes back every year whether your group grew or not. Junto's $4.99 plus tax is a single unlock tied to member count on one calendar, paid once if you ever need it at all.

Here's the comparison stripped down to the pricing decision, not the full feature list. Skip this table if you're deciding based on lists and meal planning, since Junto doesn't compete there at all; it's only useful if the calendar and its price are the actual complaint.

Cozi is built around more than a calendar: shopping lists, a meal planner, chores, and recipes all live in the same app. Junto has none of that. It's a shared calendar with RSVP, nothing else.

If your family actually uses Cozi's lists and meals every day, switching to Junto means losing those features entirely, not finding them somewhere else in the app. There's no equivalent shopping list, no recipe box, and no chore chart hiding in a settings menu. This page is not going to pretend otherwise: a page that only praises Junto over Cozi wouldn't be honest about what you'd give up.

If lists, meals, and chores are part of your daily routine and the calendar is just one piece of that, Cozi Gold's $39/year is a reasonable price for the whole system. Junto won't replace that.

Think of it as a bundle price. $39/year for a shared calendar, a shopping list, a meal planner, and chores across a whole household works out to a few dollars a month for four tools, not one. If you use all four, the math still favors Cozi. Switching to Junto for the calendar alone and keeping a separate list app elsewhere would likely cost you more in time than the $39/year saves, since you'd be juggling two apps instead of one.

If your family or group mainly wants the calendar, and the yearly fee or the ad-supported 30-day window is the actual complaint, Junto removes both. No ads, no time limit, and no subscription to keep paying.

It also works for groups that aren't a household: roommates, friend groups, or a couple who never needed Cozi's family features in the first place. Cozi is built around the household unit; Junto doesn't assume you're a family at all, so a group of friends splitting rent or planning trips fits it just as well. It also adds something Cozi's calendar doesn't: RSVP by name, going, maybe, or not going, and who's going shown on the event.

It's also the right move if the 30-day window is the specific trigger. If you noticed the limit because you tried to check next month's plans and hit a wall, that's the exact problem Junto doesn't have. And if the group isn't really a household at all, a bachelorette planning crew, a rotating carpool, a few roommates, Cozi's family framing doesn't fit the group in the first place, separate from the price question.

There's no import from Cozi to Junto, no CSV export from one that the other reads. You re-add your upcoming events by hand when you switch.

For a family or group calendar, that's realistic: most calendars only have a handful of recurring commitments and a few weeks of plans worth re-entering, not years of history to migrate. Recreate the recurring stuff first, birthdays, practices, standing appointments, then add whatever's coming up in the next month or two. That covers what most families actually check day to day.

You don't need to cancel Cozi Gold the same day either. Running both for a couple of weeks while you rebuild the calendar on Junto is a reasonable way to make sure nothing gets missed in the switch.

Most "Cozi alternative" searches aren't about the app's design or its feature list. They start the moment someone tries to check a date more than a month out and hits the paywall for the first time. That's a pricing decision Cozi made in May 2024, not a limitation that was always there.

Junto was built after seeing that kind of wall, not around one. There's no 30-day cutoff to design around, so the whole calendar, past and future, is simply just there. The ads that came with the same May 2024 change are a second, smaller version of the same problem: something that used to just work now interrupts you. Junto's calendars, free or paid, carry no ads at any member count.

Junto's free tier isn't a trial either. A private calendar with 8 or fewer members stays free for as long as you use it, full calendar, no ads, no expiration date. The $4.99 plus tax only applies once, only if a private calendar grows past 8 members, and public calendars skip that limit entirely and stay free no matter how many people join. Payment runs through Stripe, and there's nothing to cancel afterward because nothing renews.