Comment by solatic
2 years ago
Looks super interesting, and that $3/month for hobbyists is just low enough to meet my budget for hobby services, but please, for on-call stuff, you gotta have alerts that make phone calls. Nothing else is going to wake me in the middle of the night. This is the #1 feature I expect from an on-call service - you're on-call because you will be called.
Thanks for the feedback!
We use iOS “Critical Alerts” and similar on Android that breaks through any Do-Not-Disturb settings. https://heiioncall.com/blog/better-alerting-for-heii-on-call... Would you be willing to give that a shot? It wakes me every time :)
(It’s configurable too; we have vibrate-only or silenced modes. Think old-school beeper.)
In the rare case that it doesn’t wake you, we have configurable escalation strategies to alert someone else on your team after a configurable number of minutes.
One of the things about phone calls is that they will continue to ring and ring until you actively decide to answer or ignore; it's not just a half-second "ping!" sound delivered once. This is also useful in meetings when everything else is closed up or silenced, to jar you out.
I usually do not respond immediately to phone notifications, which I can handle async. Phone calls are by definition sync.
Ah yeah, these are no ordinary phone notifications. :)
Heii On-Call will keep alerting you with these “Critical Alerts” until you’ve manually acknowledged. (Or until it escalates to a teammate and they acknowledge…)
And at least on my phone they sound nothing like normal phone notifications, which I personally always have on vibrate and/or DND anyway.
Give it a try and I think you’ll like it.
We are building a great and affordable incident escalation tool as well:
https://allquiet.app
With SMS, Phone Calls and Critical Alerts / DnD override.
We're 5 USD/user.
We try to build as close to our users as possible. Happy for any new try outs! :)
(I am co founder)