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Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#72I do t get the pricing on things like this and pingdom. This stuff seems like it should be cheap, like $5/user/mo. But everyone seems to go expensive. There are other industries that are similar, but this always stood out to me as an industry where the pricing never felt right to me.
I appreciate the feedback. We tried to think of our pricing as the value a user would get out of the tool. The amount of time and headache we'd save them when actually responding to an incident. We've found a lot more pushback for smaller sized companies (e.g. Just curious for my own learning, is the thinking behind "should be cheap" motivated by potentially not everyone would need access to tools in monitoring, aler…
If you charge the value a user gets out of the tool, an economically rational user would be indifferent between buying your tool and not buying it. (Given that choice, a user should probably avoid buying as they’re economically no better off, but now they have the complexity of another vendor to manage for no net gain.)
There are well established reference points that you’re at least nominally going to be compared to. “Is X worth more or less than Slack? O365? Box? gSuite?”
That is probably going to create a stronger anchor on perceived value than a carefully calculated product of reduction in MTTR * cost of outage * frequency of such savings.
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#73I will echo the other comments on no upfront pricing. Even though this could be potentially useful for my team, I won't "contact" you for pricing. I am sick of having to deal with salespeople who want to know a ton of info about your business so they can gouge every last cent out of you and then some. I would gladly pay a little extra just to have clear pricing and sign up with a credit card. I have got an engineerin…
I'll just ask, flag if this is out of place, I see lots of complaining about pricing - how many of those people are in a position where they would actually be buying this? Isn't it an enterprise product targeted to executive level buyers, and customized to the business? Just because some users or hands-on folks at smaller companies are angry they can't get a price doesn't mean there is a problem. It's probably a feature from a business perspective. Not every business model can just give a $x/user/month price.
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#74Aren't you concerned with IR or ITSM tools (ala ServiceNow) just copying your patterns and adding it to their existing Slack Apps? Slack already has public demos with pretty much the same pattern you've adopted. Have you got a bigger end-goal, because this is trivial to copy well. You need a moat, or you need to seek acquisition quick.
My thought as well. Their opening statement talks about Pagerduty handing off incident response to Rootly. Well, Pagerduty can just launch an incident response platform and now you're out of business.
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#75Aren't you concerned with IR or ITSM tools (ala ServiceNow) just copying your patterns and adding it to their existing Slack Apps? Slack already has public demos with pretty much the same pattern you've adopted. Have you got a bigger end-goal, because this is trivial to copy well. You need a moat, or you need to seek acquisition quick.
My thought as well. Their opening statement talks about Pagerduty handing off incident response to Rootly. Well, Pagerduty can just launch an incident response platform and now you're out of business.
PagerDuty legitimately have this flow on their YouTube demo from March last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEZCZG8y1eY
Surely there's more to it if they got YC funded?
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#76I will echo the other comments on no upfront pricing. Even though this could be potentially useful for my team, I won't "contact" you for pricing. I am sick of having to deal with salespeople who want to know a ton of info about your business so they can gouge every last cent out of you and then some. I would gladly pay a little extra just to have clear pricing and sign up with a credit card. I have got an engineerin…
I'll just ask, flag if this is out of place, I see lots of complaining about pricing - how many of those people are in a position where they would actually be buying this? Isn't it an enterprise product targeted to executive level buyers, and customized to the business? Just because some users or hands-on folks at smaller companies are angry they can't get a price doesn't mean there is a problem. It's probably a feat…
> Isn't it an enterprise product targeted to executive level buyers, and customized to the business?
Maybe, and maybe not. Execs aren't or at least shouldn't be making these kinds of decisions in a vacuum, they should be asking their engineering/technical people for input. And in a lot of places stuff like this might be purchased at the business unit or even team level.
I work at a large enterprise (as in >100k employees) but our business unit/division's execs would consult with teams like mine before buying into a product like this, and for some tooling we may actually be tasked with investigating it and talking to sale creatures ourselves. For example we're looking for new ways to implement and manage SLO's that would shape development work for ~9k people, and even the junior engineers on our team attended meetings and demo's with multiple vendors related to this goal.
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#77I'm very curious, why base everything on Slack? There's no denying it's super popular (and my preferred choice for collab) but the majority of businesses don't use it, and it indirectly adds cost to your product; if I want to use (and pay for) Rootly I also have to pay for Slack (which is expensive).
And to echo everyone else here; not having up front pricing is a big red flag. You've done well to attract the large customers you have at the moment, but you're going to struggle to draw in the long tail. Engineering teams don't want to talk to your sales people and they shouldn't need to - if AWS can tell me what I'll be paying right down to the second for something, I'm sure you can tell me how much your tool will cost me to use each month without needing to call me.
EDIT:
I should also clarify, I actually quite like this tool from what I've seen of it. Looking at how we handle incidents I could see something like this addressing a lot of our pain points.
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#78I will echo the other comments on no upfront pricing. Even though this could be potentially useful for my team, I won't "contact" you for pricing. I am sick of having to deal with salespeople who want to know a ton of info about your business so they can gouge every last cent out of you and then some. I would gladly pay a little extra just to have clear pricing and sign up with a credit card. I have got an engineerin…
I wish it was also standard to provider a small sandbox environment where I can go setup things and play around. I don't want to book a demo where I'll again be hooked up with someone from sales for a long presentation. For someone with a few million in funding, there should really be no excuse to not invest in this.
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#79I will echo the other comments on no upfront pricing. Even though this could be potentially useful for my team, I won't "contact" you for pricing. I am sick of having to deal with salespeople who want to know a ton of info about your business so they can gouge every last cent out of you and then some. I would gladly pay a little extra just to have clear pricing and sign up with a credit card. I have got an engineerin…
I'll just ask, flag if this is out of place, I see lots of complaining about pricing - how many of those people are in a position where they would actually be buying this? Isn't it an enterprise product targeted to executive level buyers, and customized to the business? Just because some users or hands-on folks at smaller companies are angry they can't get a price doesn't mean there is a problem. It's probably a feat…
I'm im position of buying this kind of product (CTO of 50eng), I could be interested by this kind of tool (we're alerting a lot through slack, and I'm searching a way to better track my incidents), but i'll never take 1 hour to "present my company" and "discuss a pricing" for a such "little" product.
For a product that costs tens of thousands of $ I understand, for a product that would cost hundreds, red flag, I don't have time for that. Incidentally, there is nothing worse than non-transparent prices, which can change dramatically every year
If AWS manages to have public pricing (with customers ranging at $100/m, $1000000/m), why not you?
Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry, but if your pricing is too complex to write out on the pricing page so I can know upfront if it's even worth talking to you, I won't reach out to you. It also suggests that your pricing is simply too complex, and that would hurt me as a paying customer as well, as I wouldn't fully understand the invoices I receive from you. Building a calculator that lets potential customers input their variables and you s…
Thank you for the feedback, a calculator is a good suggestion! We realize there are a fair number of people that will be turned away by this, we'll see what we can do for a better middle ground.
I’d also suggest you have a free plan for very small teams. You can already see how many slack members they have. Make your tool so people just make it their default and then as the team grows the naturally start paying you up the tiers.