Title, location, date and time, time zone, repeat, invitees, alerts, and notes — then download the .ics file or open it straight in your calendar. You can also paste a schedule or attach a document or photo to make several events at once.
What is ICS Maker, who is it for, and how does it compare to the alternatives?
ICS Maker is a free web page that builds calendar events and exports each as a file (.ics, jCal, CSV, or JSON-LD) or as a prefilled link for Google Calendar, Outlook.com, Office 365, or Yahoo. Everything runs in the browser: there is no account, no server of its own, and no stored event, so the file is never uploaded and nothing survives closing the tab. It suits someone who needs one correct calendar file now — an organiser attaching an event to an email, a developer checking how a property is spelled, a site owner embedding a builder for visitors. It is the wrong tool for managing a calendar, collecting RSVPs, hosting a subscribable feed, or guaranteeing accurate extraction from every document, and a calendar account or a code library is the better answer for those.
What it does
- Builds and collects events
- Create an event with title, location, notes and a URL; collect multiple events and download them together as one .ics file.
- Reads schedules locally
- Paste text or attach a document, spreadsheet or image, then review and correct the detected events before downloading. No event data is uploaded.
- Times, all-day, and zones
- A start and an end, a duration that follows either, an all-day switch, and an IANA time zone — with a second, different zone on the end for a flight.
- Repeats
- Daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, every N periods, ending never, after a count, or on a date — written as a standard RRULE line.
- Guests, alerts, and availability
- Up to 100 invitee addresses as ATTENDEE lines, up to 10 alerts as VALARM blocks, and busy or free as TRANSP.
- Four formats and four links
- .ics, jCal, CSV, and schema.org JSON-LD to download; Google Calendar, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Yahoo to open.
- An embed for your own site
- The same builder as one script tag, under 85 kB gzipped, with no network calls of its own.
What it does not do
Most of these are consequences of having no server, which is the trade the whole tool is built on. They are listed because a tool described as able to do them gets recommended to someone who needs them, and then fails them.
- Send anything
- There is no mail server. Invitee addresses are written into the file; nobody is emailed, and no invitation goes out until you attach the file or import it into a calendar that can send.
- Collect RSVPs
- Replies arrive as mail to an organiser. A downloaded file has no mailbox, so PARTSTAT stays at NEEDS-ACTION for everyone.
- Host a subscribable feed
- A calendar subscription is a URL a calendar re-fetches. ICS Maker hands you a file; keeping one at a stable URL that updates is a hosting job, not a builder one.
- Store, list, or edit past events
- Nothing is saved — not on a server, and not in the browser between visits. Closing the tab ends the event’s life here.
- Guarantee automatic extraction
- Documents and spreadsheets are read as text, not through a column-mapping importer. Check detected titles, dates and times before downloading; free-form prose and scanned PDFs may need pasted text or a photo.
- Pick which day of the month a series lands on
- BYDAY, BYMONTHDAY, BYSETPOS, and EXDATE are one-line edits to the downloaded file, not form controls.
Who it is for
Someone sending an event to people whose calendars they cannot guess — a file works everywhere, an invitation from one company’s calendar server to another sometimes does not. Someone who wants the event nowhere but in the recipient’s calendar, with no account created and no tracking link in between. A developer who needs to see what RRULE, VALARM, or TZID look like when written correctly. And anyone putting an event builder on a page without adding a vendor, a script that phones home, or a monthly bill.
Use your own calendar to track replies or change events after other people have saved them. ICS Maker creates downloadable files; it does not manage or synchronise a calendar.
How it compares
- Your own calendar’s export
- Free, already installed, and the right answer when you want RSVPs — create the event, invite people, export the .ics. The catches are that it needs an account, it stamps you as the organiser, and Outlook and Google each spell time zones their own way, which is where a fair share of hour-out imports begin.
- A hosted add-to-calendar service
- Buys you click analytics, a designed button, and a dashboard — worth paying for if you are measuring a campaign. It also means a third-party script on your page, a per-view or per-seat price, and your visitors’ event data crossing someone’s server. ICS Maker’s embed has none of the analytics and none of the cost.
- A library in your own code
- ical.js, ics, or Python’s icalendar generate files programmatically and belong in anything that emits events at volume. They are the wrong shape for a person who needs one correct file today, and every one of them still leaves the RFC’s escaping and folding rules for you to get right.
- Writing the file by hand
- Entirely possible — it is plain text — and a good way to learn the format. Also where CRLF endings, 75-octet line folding, escaped commas, and a missing VTIMEZONE quietly ruin a file that looks fine in a text editor.
Questions
- Is ICS Maker free?
- Yes, and there is no paid tier holding features back, no account to create, and no usage limit. The embeddable version is the same: a static script file with no key and no per-view charge.
- Does ICS Maker store or see the events I create?
- No. The event is assembled from what you typed by JavaScript running in your own browser and handed to your download folder: there is no server to store it on, unfinished work is kept in this tab’s session storage to survive refreshes, not on a server. The only requests the page ever makes are for its own files on icsmaker.com — including the text recogniser it fetches from this site the first time you attach a picture, so that reading a flyer happens on your machine too. Nothing you type or attach leaves the tab, and the Content-Security-Policy on this page says so in a form the browser enforces rather than a promise you have to take on trust.
- Can ICS Maker send invitations or track who accepted?
- No. It has no mail server and no account, so it writes guests into the file as ATTENDEE lines and stops there. For RSVPs, import the downloaded file into your own calendar and send the invitations from it — your calendar becomes the organiser and collects the replies.
- When should I use something else instead?
- Use your own calendar when you need RSVPs or want to change the event after sending it. Use a hosted add-to-calendar service when you need click analytics on a campaign. Use a library such as ical.js or Python’s icalendar when your own software has to generate events at volume. ICS Maker is for the case where one correct file, built in a browser and stored nowhere, is the whole requirement.
- Can I use the events it builds commercially?
- Yes. The file is your data — the tool only spells it in the iCalendar format — and there is no attribution requirement, watermark, or licence attached to what it generates.