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Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

allquiet.app

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Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#31

Post by PragmaticPulp »

steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of…

I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. I constantly felt like I was missing something. A tool this mature and popular should have been a little more polished by now.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#32

Post by dmattia »

mads_quist wrote: post #12
dmattia wrote: post #7

> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. Does this mean that there are no text/call options? I don't have a smartphone to install apps, but haven't had problems with being on on-call rotations with some of the other tools mentioned.

Yes, it doesn't have SMS / call Options explicitly.

I guess I just can't work for any company using All Quiet then, which is fair as I understand both my perspective and yours. But just adding this comment as a data point to consider, and I wish you the best.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#33

Post by mdaniel »

I'm surprised to see you used Mongo (https://github.com/AllQuietApp/MongoQueueing#what-about-rabb...) after all the replies in this thread citing "delivery reliability"

What did you find that made NoSQL a good fit for tracking incidents and escalations?

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#34

Post by biohax2015 »

blantonl wrote: post #30

I'm frustrated with the pricing of Pager Duty, so I'm developing my own solution and making it available here What about a? It won't do b, c, d, x, and y, that's a deal breaker for me. Can I do d, f, t, m - no? Ugh, nice try good luck on your project.

What does this add to the conversation? You didn’t even put in enough effort to complain about actual things…

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#35

Post by compumike »

mLuby wrote: post #11

Why is the pricing per user? Is that what your costs are most dependent on? I bet not. I'd argue $5/user is just teaser pricing on its way to PagerDuty's $21+/user. Regardless, cool project—happy to see more competition.

Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ has flat pricing regardless of team size.

To be pedantic, it's free for individuals / teams-of-one, so I guess you could write:

    def price_per_month(team_size)
      if team_size == 1
        0
      else
        32
      end
    end
Disclosure: I helped build it :)

EDIT: thanks to those of you signing up to try Heii On-Call! Let me know if you have any questions.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#36

Post by steveBK123 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31
steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of…

I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. I constantly felt like I was missing something. A tool this mature and popular should have been a little more polished by now.

It felt like a tool that was sold to CTOs, not users.

As a recipient of pages, I abhorred PagerDuty more than Slack, Teams, email or even phone calls.

At least my phone notifications & do not disturb mode can be tuned around some of those other apps. And if a support guy or teammate calls me on holiday, I can berate them such that they remember to check the holiday calendar / out-of-office status next time. No such luck with PagerDuty.

If your org is not mature enough to put in the time to have a single pane of glass / view of the world / alert state.. you shouldn't be buying any of these tools.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#37

Post by singron »

steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of…

For instance at Google, taking vacation in workday puts an OOO event on your Google calendar. Then the oncall scheduler takes that into account along with your oncall history when it schedules new rotations. You only have to get someone to cover if you are taking time off in the near future, and any surplus or deficit will be fixed by the scheduler going forward.

It's kind of wild that an expensive product with tons of funding and employees is worse than some scripts cooked up by some SREs.

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#38

Post by mcsniff »

I would recommend running through your docs with a native english speaker.

Congratulations on the launch! Be proud of what you've put together here, and looks to be all by yourself too? The infra for a site, backend, and polished mobile apps for both platforms on your own.

From another "I'm doing it all myself" dude, very well done!

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#39

Post by [deleted] »

oigursh wrote: post #27
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #14

> That's why All Quiet notifications are app only. This is prone to loss. I've struggled with notification delivery reliability on Android for years . If I don't touch my phone for a few hours and then wake the screen, I get a flurry of notifications all at once from the last few hours. But I need to be aware of pages in real-time. There should really be a call and text notification channel else I don't see this gett…

I ended up hiring a US emergency dispatcher team and repurposing them - they would literally phone you up as second line - no robots.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself

#40

Post by BlackjackCF »

steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I found PagerDuty to be grossly underwhelming when our team moved to it. I'd focus on stupid-easy integration & some reasonable calendar management to differentiate. PagerDuty Calendar/Holiday/Workday management and cross-regional scheduling were very poorly implemented. The amount of manual schedule adjustment when someone actually wanted to take their 1 week vacation was insane. We ended up with overrides on top of…

I’m not sure why PD is so expensive, but I think why it’s just known over competitors is just the sheer number of integrations it supports.
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