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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

#101

Post by mLuby »

jedberg wrote: post #70

The main problem that Pagerduty solved at the time was deliverability of alerts. It was hard, and still is, to solve the problem of making sure the right people actually get the alerts. It was so expensive because they have redundant hardware all over the place with different providers, and they ran it all themselves, including SMS and phone gateways. One of their key differentiators was that they were not built on A…

And yet misconfigurations still mean people don't get paged.

A simple solution is to make triggering a "fire drill" a standard part of your on-call rotation hand-off.

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

#102

Post by folmar »

traceroute66 wrote: post #55
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 ge…

The small print is irrelevant as the amount of money you get for SLA breach is usually less or equal to what you pay.

What matters is the execution and word of mouth. And PagerDuty is widely known to be rock solid.

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

#103

Post by urbandw311er »

compumike wrote: post #35
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.

wait, if you remove everyone from your team it costs $32 ?

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

#104

Post by jedberg »

mLuby wrote: post #101
jedberg wrote: post #70

The main problem that Pagerduty solved at the time was deliverability of alerts. It was hard, and still is, to solve the problem of making sure the right people actually get the alerts. It was so expensive because they have redundant hardware all over the place with different providers, and they ran it all themselves, including SMS and phone gateways. One of their key differentiators was that they were not built on A…

And yet misconfigurations still mean people don't get paged. A simple solution is to make triggering a "fire drill" a standard part of your on-call rotation hand-off.

We solved that by just triggering an alert five minutes after the rotation changed.

This made sure the new on-call was aware they had started their shift and had access to acknowledge the page and clear it.

And if they didn’t it escalated to tier two, who would find out why tier 1 didn’t clear it.

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

#105

Post by gmjosack »

Would love to see more disruption in this space. Like others have said it's actually amazing how bad the calendar/scheduling portion of PagerDuty is. Multiple places I've worked we ended up making our own interface to managing schedules because the UI at PagerDuty is so bad. Also, people mentioning the rock solid reliability of PagerDuty likely don't have good monitoring of PagerDuty. When I worked on monitoring in the past we regularly encountered delayed notifications and ingestion failures. Pulling up their status page right now confirms they still have multiple issues a month. At a past employer we had our notification system actually check outstanding alert status and fall back to direct SMS when the ingestion latency was too high.

I worked on pygerduty, a python client library for PagerDuty, at a past job so I spent a lot of time talking to people at PagerDuty but I think they stopped inviting me to their "Founder's Club" meetings when I told them I didn't care about AI Alerts and wanted better UIs for scheduling and better reliability.

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

#108

Post by compumike »

urbandw311er wrote: post #103
compumike wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

wait, if you remove everyone from your team it costs $32 ?

Shhh… that’s our secret business model! Infinite revenue per user :P

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

#109

Post by jq-r »

viraptor wrote: post #98
jq-r wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have absolutely no idea why PD doesn't have a big button which stops all PD notifications the moment you press it. There are very few events in life more stressful then dealing with an incident, people on the call and having your phone alerting and ringing all the frigging time. I was once told to mute myself on incident bridge because all that alerting was not only super iritating for me, but for others too. I was…

You can manually put the service in maintenance mode. That will stop it alerting for a specified period.

Good to know, thanks. It is kind of buried and something which is difficult to find in a hurry.

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

#110

Post by mleonhard »

Feature request: "Quiet wakeup mode" that vibrates the user's Apple Watch for a minute before making any sound. Then start the sound at the lowest volume (inaudible) and slowly increase it over 1 minute. This would be supremely useful for being oncall while sleeping near another person.

Feature request 2: "Earplug mode" that slowly increases volume and vibration from zero to max, and stays at max for 1 minute. Support alternating various tones, sounds, and voices.

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