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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

#51

Post by smachiz »

iso1631 wrote: post #46
smachiz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when does anyone set or scale their price on their costs?

A big argument against LVT that people (often landlords, but many "socialists" too) is that rents will simply rise to reflect the extra cost to the landlord Same with increase interest rates It's certainly widely believed that "price = cost + %profit" rather than "price = level at which maximum profit will be achieved after factoring in market segregation"

I mean, LVT or not, that is probably true. If the price increase affects the entire market, landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored (or renters will increase their willingness to pay a higher rate).

If market price LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.

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

#52

Post by ChrisInEdmonton »

I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used.

I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want to make very sure you are aware why people still pay for Pagerduty. To compete, you need to be looking at 99.99% uptime or better (ideally 99.999%, 5 minutes of downtime a year) where 'uptime' is defined as the ability to exercise the entire notification stack. The moment someone's site has an outage and you aren't able to deliver the notification, you lose the customer and everyone they talk to.

I also worry about in-app notifications, but that's well-covered by everyone else's comments.

Pagerduty is vulnerable. Their UI is garbage. But you need to have bullet-proof uptime to take them down. It's a tough challenge and I wish you luck!

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

#53

Post by yawaramin »

bink wrote: post #50

Will you be using PagerDuty or another competitor to monitor your own service? I always wonder what these companies use... or if they rely on their own service. And if so, then if their service breaks how would they know?

Who do PagerDuty or OpsGenie use to monitor their services?

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

#54

Post by yawaramin »

zufallsheld wrote: post #45
mads_quist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad. :( Would've loved to help you out. Would you mind elaborating on your usecases and why it's axactly a deal breaker?

I for one sometimes are in regions where internet access is spotty, but getting a call works.

What are you supposed to do exactly when you are in a region with spotty internet and you get a page? Jump on an incident bridge, pull up the logs and dashboards, and start debugging? If are you going to somewhere with spotty internet, presumably it didn't just happen all of a sudden and you knew in advance, and thus could have swapped on-call duty with someone else who would have reliable internet?

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

#55

Post by traceroute66 »

ChrisInEdmonton wrote: post #52

I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used. I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want…

> But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses.

Ah, but as always, the million dollar question is ..... What does the PagerDuty small print say ?

My guess is the small print is not "bulletproof reliability" or five-nines. I betcha their contract is full of exclusions and get-outs.

It's a bit like the famous Verizon 100% SLA. Any idiot knows its not technically feasible, but the reason you pay the Verizon-tax is so the've got some cash to pay you the inevitable SLA claims.

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

#56

Post by iso1631 »

smachiz wrote: post #51
iso1631 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big argument against LVT that people (often landlords, but many "socialists" too) is that rents will simply rise to reflect the extra cost to the landlord Same with increase interest rates It's certainly widely believed that "price = cost + %profit" rather than "price = level at which maximum profit will be achieved after factoring in market segregation"

I mean, LVT or not, that is probably true. If the price increase affects the entire market, landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored (or renters will increase their willingness to pay a higher rate). If market price LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.

> landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored

Thus a increasing the supply of properties being sold, and thus lowering the price for those who want to buy, allowing more to buy, reducing the demand for places to rent. Win-Win.

With LVT (or higher interest rate on a variable rate mortgage) the parasitical landlord can't simply stop having a tenant, as they're still liable for the costs. They have to offer something more than the intrinsic cost of land they occupy to make it productive enough for someone to pay them.

> LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.

There's a strong argument that copyright (specifically that used to prevent people from using it) would count as "Land" in the economic sense - it drives rentseeking and monopoly behavior - https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/possibility-space-...

An interesting debate, but somewhat offtopipc

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

#57

Post by smachiz »

iso1631 wrote: post #56
smachiz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, LVT or not, that is probably true. If the price increase affects the entire market, landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored (or renters will increase their willingness to pay a higher rate). If market price LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.

> landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored Thus a increasing the supply of properties being sold, and thus lowering the price for those who want to buy, allowing more to buy, reducing the demand for places to rent. Win-Win. With LVT (or higher interest rate on a variable rate mortgage) the parasitical landlord can't simply stop having a tenant, as they're still liable for the costs. They have to o…

It is interesting re: copyright, but rarely are software IP rights enforced via copyright. Patents are more likely.

Copyright for software is a very low bar to hurdle.

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

#58

Post by mlhpdx »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #43
ratg13 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever start a business selling anything at all, the very first thing you will need to realize is that you never base prices on how much something costs. You base prices on what people are willing to pay.

Like most business advice this sounds good as a one-liner, but isn't super accurate. There are lots of businesses that need to evaluate price elasticity and substitution which is more than finding the right point on the demand curve.

There are also plenty of companies that run into trouble with excessive “value-based“ pricing, aka. The Innovator’s Dilemma, as Pager Duty is now.

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

#59

Post by zufallsheld »

yawaramin wrote: post #54
zufallsheld wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one sometimes are in regions where internet access is spotty, but getting a call works.

What are you supposed to do exactly when you are in a region with spotty internet and you get a page? Jump on an incident bridge, pull up the logs and dashboards, and start debugging? If are you going to somewhere with spotty internet, presumably it didn't just happen all of a sudden and you knew in advance, and thus could have swapped on-call duty with someone else who would have reliable internet?

> What are you supposed to do exactly when you are in a region with spotty internet and you get a page?

Go somewhere with better internet access. Not all incidents require that you must immediately check on it.

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

#60

Post by mlhpdx »

Is there a notification system that tries to be a little smarter about escalations? That seems a difficult area. A developer doesn’t know - should this be escalated, or should it not? Is it sufficiently impactful, or not? The same questions arise in customer success who generally error on the side of raising the escalation level at the expense of rest. This seems like an area that could be vastly improved with statistics (something like Robust Decisions) or machine learning. I haven’t seen that, and wonder if others have?
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