Best Open-Source Startup Event Tools & Agents (Updated Weekly)
Last updated: September 11, 2026. Reviewed weekly.
There is no open-source tool that finds startup events for you. We looked hard, and what exists is developers.events and Confs.tech for developer conferences, frm for pre-meeting briefs, and PingCRM or Twenty for follow-up. Thirteen tools total, and none of them covers demo days, accelerator cohort calls or VC mixers.
This is the thinnest of the four categories we track, and padding it would waste your afternoon. So this page does two jobs: it lists what genuinely exists, and then it tells you exactly which parts of the workflow you'd have to build yourself — because that second half is the actually useful answer.
What we learned by running this again this week
Four findings, and two of them correct things we told you last week.
1. We were wrong about luma.com/waterloo. It is a real city page. Last week we said it "resolves to an unrelated event page from a past cohort" and used it as the headline example of Luma's patchy city coverage. That was wrong. It resolves to a genuine Waterloo discovery place and returned a full event list this week — eleven startup and AI events after filtering, including most of Waterloo Tech Week. We're flagging it here because it was load-bearing: it was the evidence for "city-page coverage silently fails for mid-size cities," and that argument is now weaker than we made it sound.
2. luma.com/ottawa genuinely is a dead end, and now we know what it is. It's a community calendar — "Ottawa AI and Tech Community" — not a city discovery page, and it has zero upcoming events. Its ICS feed is live and returns an empty calendar. So the "mid-size cities fail" point survives, but on a sample of one rather than two.
3. There is a real unauthenticated Luma discovery endpoint, and we used it. Here's the honest tension. api.lu.ma/discover/get-paginated-events returns clean JSON — name, start time, URL, host, venue — with no key and no account, and it paginates properly where the rendered page lazy-loads. It is also exactly the kind of undocumented endpoint this page has twice told you not to point anything at. We used it this week because it was the difference between a complete sweep and a partial one, and we're not going to recommend a practice publicly while quietly doing the opposite. Our position: it works, it's undocumented, it can change or close without notice, and it carries a terms-of-service question we can't resolve for you. Prefer ICS. Read rendered pages where ICS doesn't exist. If you use the discover endpoint anyway, know you're building on something with no stability promise — and keep it away from anything you sell.
4. The ICS feeds are the real find, and they're the part that keeps working. Every Luma calendar exposes https://api.lu.ma/ics/get?entity=calendar&id=<calendar_id> and returns a standard VCALENDAR with no key and no browser. We verified four this week: Waterloo Tech Week (124 events), MaRS Discovery District (18), Communitech (16) and the dormant Ottawa one (0). This is a published, standard interface — it survives your browser automation breaking, it survives your scraper breaking, and a normal calendar app can subscribe to it. If you build one thing from this page, build the ICS subscriber.
One limit worth documenting: Luma's authenticated endpoints don't accept a browser session — get-subscribed-calendars returns 401 even from a signed-in tab. The calendars you personally follow are not reachable programmatically. Only calendars you can name are.
And a note on last week's outage: our browser automation failed on every page last week, including example.com. It worked normally this week from the same codebase against the same sites — consistent with a transient fault. The advice stands regardless: have two ways in, and make the failure loud.
Event discovery
developers.events (2,002 stars, MIT) lists dev and tech conferences worldwide and publishes JSON. Confs.tech (277, MIT) is a community JSON dataset. Meetable (168, MIT) is a self-hosted listing site. eventbrite-python (5, MIT) wraps an API that can no longer search. TechEventRadar (4, MIT) scrapes ten Turkey-only sites. luma-mcp (0, MIT) manages events via the official API. luma-cal-mcp (0, MIT) searches Luma Discover via undocumented endpoints.
The one we'd use first: developers.events. Re-verified September 11: all-events.json returns 6,142 events, 2,076 of them dated 2026 — up from 6,108/2,047 last week and 6,081/2,029 the week before. Three consecutive weeks of growth, so it's genuinely maintained. Plus 3,632 calls for papers. MIT, no scraping, no key, no account. The honest limitation is the whole problem: it's developer-conference biased. Startup ecosystem events appear in almost none of it.
Three warnings. eventbrite-python works and cannot help you discover anything — the public search endpoint was switched off in February 2020, so wrappers only manage events you already own, and it hasn't been committed to in three years. luma-cal-mcp reverse-engineers undocumented endpoints; the author says so plainly in the README, which is to their credit and doesn't make it safer. We'd now reach for ICS feeds first, a plain browser second, this tool third. And Meetable is not an aggregator despite how it reads — you post events into it by hand.
Conference prep
One tool. frm (15 stars, MIT) builds pre-meeting briefs from your CardDAV contacts and recent email, and ships a SKILL.md so an agent can drive it. Honest limitation: it only knows what you already know. It does no external research on speakers or attendees, which is the half that actually takes time.
We filled that gap by hand again this week, and it got faster. Organizer speaker pages are usually plain HTML lists — one festival's directory gave us 230+ named speakers with titles and companies in a single page read, a SaaS conference gave 80 more, total time under ten minutes. What it did not give us was verified LinkedIn URLs. Those still have to be confirmed one at a time, and speaker-page links are frequently auto-generated LinkedIn search URLs rather than real profiles. That's a trap worth knowing about.
Networking, CRM and after the event
Twenty (56,594, licence no longer resolving — AGPL-3.0 plus enterprise files is the project's own description), Monica (25,266, AGPL-3.0), EspoCRM (3,340, AGPL-3.0), PingCRM (120, AGPL-3.0) and Tilly (64, MIT).
The one we'd install first: Twenty. The most actively developed open CRM here, API-first, and custom objects mean you can model an event as a first-class thing rather than a note. Honest limitation: it's a sales CRM with no concept of an event, a session or a badge scan. You're doing that modelling yourself.
Monica is built for friends and family, not deal flow, and its last stable release is v4.1.2 from May 2024. PingCRM is the most interesting for post-event work — it merges Gmail and Telegram into one timeline and drafts follow-ups it never auto-sends, which is the correct default after you've met forty people and can't remember which conversation was which. Run it with the LinkedIn extension switched off; that extension is the part most likely to break or get an account flagged.
Where the open-source shelf is empty
Eleven jobs have no good open-source tool: no aggregator for startup or VC events; no legitimate Luma search API (an undocumented discovery endpoint works and ICS feeds are properly supported, but there's no documented queryable interface); no Eventbrite discovery API; no maintained Meetup client; nothing that de-duplicates one event across platforms; no attendee or speaker research tool; no agenda triage; no working badge or business-card capture; no free post-event enrichment; no event-aware CRM; and no event category in the MCP registries.
One trap: the GitHub topics are false friends. event-aggregation is dominated by the .NET design pattern, luma by Luma AI video and the Magento Luma theme. There's no topic where this category actually lives.
How would you build an event radar today?
Eight steps. Step 3 has been rewritten again this week, and it now leads with ICS.
- Seed from the two open datasets —
developers.events/all-events.json,all-cfps.json, and Confs.tech's per-year files. Free, no code. - Accept that this misses every startup event, and fill the gap by hand. Keep a curated seed list of accelerator, VC and ecosystem calendars for your region. No tool exists; pretending otherwise is the main failure mode.
- Subscribe to ICS feeds first; read pages second. Every Luma calendar publishes one at
api.lu.ma/ics/get?entity=calendar&id=<id>— a standard VCALENDAR, no key, no browser, no undocumented endpoint. Build your seed list of calendar ids once and this step needs no automation ever again. Where no feed exists, Luma city pages and Eventbrite browse pages render fully in an ordinary browser. - Normalise and de-duplicate. Fuzzy-match on name plus start date plus city. Roughly a hundred lines you write — our own sweep produced five duplicate pairs this week.
- Score events against your thesis with an LLM step. Where an agent earns its place, and where no skill exists to copy.
- Store survivors in Twenty or EspoCRM as a custom object. You define the event object yourself.
- Prep with
frmplus a manual pass over the speaker list. Treat any LinkedIn URL on a speaker page as unverified until you've opened it. - Close the loop with PingCRM. LinkedIn extension off.
Steps 1, 7 and 8 are genuinely served by open source. Steps 2, 4 and 5 are code you write. That ratio is the honest state of this category, and it's why most founders end up with a spreadsheet instead.
Three verification rules to steal. The most common failure in event data is the wrong year — if the year isn't explicit on the organizer's own page, discard the record rather than inferring it. Never let a discovery step fail silently; an empty list looks identical to a quiet week. And, new this week: check whether a source is dead before concluding a city is. We wrote off luma.com/waterloo last week on one bad read. One retry would have caught it.
Frequently asked questions
How often is this updated? Every week. Entries we cannot verify are removed or flagged rather than quietly kept.
Is this the full page? Yes — this interactive page is the canonical living guide; Substack carries the same weekly refresh.
What changed this week
Corrected, and it was our error: luma.com/waterloo is a real city page. It returned eleven relevant events this week. The "mid-size cities silently fail" argument now rests on /ottawa alone, and we've said so rather than leaving the stronger version standing.
Sharpened, not retracted: luma.com/ottawa really is a dead end — a dormant community calendar with zero upcoming events, not a broken slug.
New and genuinely useful: Luma ICS feeds, with four verified calendar ids. Waterloo Tech Week returned 124 events, MaRS 18, Communitech 16. Step 3 of the build guide now leads with this, because it's the only part of discovery that survives your automation breaking.
Stated a position we'd been dodging on the undocumented api.lu.ma/discover endpoint — we use it, and this page had twice advised against it. Written out plainly rather than quietly doing one thing and advising another.
New documented limit: Luma's authenticated endpoints reject browser sessions, so calendars you personally follow aren't reachable programmatically.
Top pick growing for a third week: developers.events at 6,142 events, 2,076 dated 2026, plus 3,632 CFPs.
All star counts re-read September 11 — the first time this page has had current numbers. Small and slow-moving, as expected: developers.events 2,000 → 2,002, frm 14 → 15, Monica 25,127 → 25,266, EspoCRM 3,305 → 3,340, PingCRM 115 → 120, Twenty 55,790 → 56,594.
Last week's browser-automation outage did not recur. Same codebase, same sites, worked normally.
No Codalio self-listing. We run an events radar internally and haven't open-sourced it. When we do, it goes on this page with the same disclosure and scrutiny as everything else — not before. Everything in the build guide, including the ICS ids, is what we actually do, described in enough detail to copy without us.