Why We Built a Free Alternative to Easy-Speak

If you're a Toastmasters club officer, scheduling software is one of those tools you only notice when it gets in the way. After several years on Easy-Speak, our officer team kept running into the same friction points and eventually decided to build the alternative we wished existed. Here's the story behind Toastmanagers.

Where Easy-Speak Came Up Short for Us

Easy-Speak was a genuine breakthrough when it launched more than 15 years ago, and a small volunteer team has kept it running for the community ever since. We have a lot of respect for that. But our own club's needs in 2025 had drifted away from what Easy-Speak was originally designed to do.

The friction points we kept hitting:

• Cost: $100–$200 per year, per club. Not huge, but a real line item for clubs operating on volunteer budgets.
• Interface era: The UI predates modern web conventions, so newer members found it harder to navigate.
• Mobile use: The product is desktop-first, which made schedule edits on a phone difficult for officers on the go.
• Manual workflows: Role assignment, lifetime balance, and tracking who did what most recently were all done by hand.
• Setup time: Getting a new club fully configured took roughly 1–2 hours.

Our VPE was spending two-plus hours per meeting on planning, recall ("who did this last?"), and manual reminder emails. We thought there was a way to reduce that for ourselves and other clubs in similar situations.

What We Built Differently

1. History-Aware Scheduling

Our algorithm automatically balances role assignments across your entire club history. Not just the current schedule—all time. If John has been Speaker 5 times and Sarah only twice, Sarah gets priority. True fairness.

2. Modern, Mobile-First Design

We built Toastmanagers in 2024 for current devices: phones, tablets, and desktops, with full feature parity across all three. Dark theme by default, smooth transitions, and a layout designed for the way modern members actually check in on club logistics.

3. Automated Email Reminders

Lock a meeting, and members automatically get beautiful HTML email reminders 7 days and 1 day before their roles. No more "I forgot I was Toastmaster!" panics.

4. Professional PDF Agendas

Right-click any meeting, generate a PDF agenda. Includes roles, timeline, themes, and your custom event structure. Print it or email it. Takes 5 seconds.

5. Pathways Tracking

Track member progress through Pathways levels and projects. Link speeches to Pathways competencies. Record completed projects and monitor advancement. Everything you need to support your members' educational journey.

6. Speech Requests & Role Preferences

Members can request preferred speaking dates, and the scheduler automatically prioritizes these requests. Set role preferences (like, dislike, avoid) and watch the algorithm respect them. Fair scheduling that actually listens to your members.

7. The Small Things Officers Asked For

Drag-and-drop role reordering. Cascade date updates. Meeting patterns for recurring schedules. Timezone support. Manual members for guests. Archived past meetings. Locked meetings to prevent accidental changes. We tried to focus on the day-to-day mechanics officers actually use, and leave out features that would have added complexity without earning their keep.

Why It's Free

Here's the thing: we're not trying to build a business (yet). We're Toastmasters who were frustrated with existing options.

A few reasons we made it free:

1. Toastmasters changed our lives. This is one way to give back to the community.
2. Volunteer-budget friendly. Many clubs run on tight budgets, and we didn't want cost to be the reason an officer team stuck with a workflow that wasn't working for them.
3. We want honest feedback. Real clubs using the product tell us what to build next.
4. Reach first, sustainability later. If we can serve 1,000 clubs well, we'll figure out a sensible long-term model that doesn't break that promise.

Could we charge? Sure. Will we eventually add premium features? Maybe. But the core scheduling, email reminders, and agendas will always be free.

What We're Missing (And Why That's OK)

We're honest about what we don't have:

• Contest Management: You run contests 2-3 times per year. Manual is fine.
• 15 Years of Features: Easy-Speak has had a decade+ head start on some niche features.

What we do offer: the workflows officers reach for in almost every meeting—scheduling, reminders, agendas, and Pathways tracking—at no cost, plus speech requests, role preferences, meeting patterns, and timezone support that fit how a lot of clubs run today.

The Results So Far

Since launching our beta:

• Typical setup time: under 10 minutes
• Reported time saved per meeting: around 2 hours from automated role balancing
• Mobile experience: full feature parity with desktop
• Cost: $0
• Feedback so far: positive, with steady iteration based on what officers ask for

Try It Yourself

Look, we know switching software is a pain. But we've made it as painless as possible:

1. Sign up (30 seconds, no credit card)
2. Create your club (1 minute)
3. Add your members (2 minutes)
4. Generate your first schedule (1 click)

Total time: under 10 minutes. If you hate it, you lost a few minutes. If you love it, you save 2 hours every meeting and $150 every year.

What's on the Roadmap

We're building in public. Here's what's shipping next and what we're researching, in order of priority:

Shipping in the next 90 days

• Easy-Speak importer: Paste your Easy-Speak member CSV and historical schedule; we'll preserve role counts so the balancer respects past activity from day one.
• Calendar sync (Google / Apple / Outlook): Each member gets a personal .ics feed so locked meetings show up alongside their work calendar.
• SMS reminders: Optional text-message reminders for the day-of, on top of email.

Coming later in 2026

• Contest management: Ballots, judges, scorecards, and tiebreaker logic for club, area, division, and district contests.
• Officer election helper: Track terms, send nomination invites, and collect secret ballots.
• Public club page: A lightweight landing page so prospective members can RSVP as guests without an account.

Researching

• Multi-club / area director dashboards.
• Optional dues collection via Stripe.
• Integrations with Toastmasters International's Club Central reporting.

We ship every two weeks and post changes to the changelog. If a feature you need isn't on this list, email us—most of our roadmap comes directly from VPE requests.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Toastmanagers work for clubs outside the US?
Yes. We support per-club timezones, locale-aware date formats, and currency-agnostic operation (since the product is free). Clubs in the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Singapore, and the EU are all using it today.

How does Toastmanagers compare to spreadsheets?
A shared Google Sheet works fine for clubs of 8–12 active members. Once you cross 15 members or start running biweekly meetings, the spreadsheet becomes the bottleneck—people overwrite each other, no one sends reminders, and tracking lifetime role balance becomes guesswork.

What if our club is hybrid (in-person + online)?
Each meeting has a location field that supports both a physical address and a video link. Reminder emails include both, and the PDF agenda renders the link as a clickable QR code for in-room members to join late.

Can multiple officers edit the schedule at once?
Yes. The schedule view is real-time—when the VPE makes an assignment, the President sees it instantly without refreshing. No more "I just sent that email!" conflicts.

What happens to our data if Toastmanagers shuts down?
We commit to giving 90 days notice plus a one-click full export of every meeting, member, and role history. We're not building toward an acquihire that orphans your data.

Questions? We're Here to Help

Have questions about switching? Want to see a feature we're missing? Just email us at managerstoast@gmail.com. We respond to every message.

We're building this for the Toastmasters community, not at them. Your feedback shapes what we build next.

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About the Author: The Toastmanagers team includes active Toastmasters from Dallas, Texas who got tired of overpaying for outdated software. We built the tool we wished existed.