If you email jj@rootly.com we can get you some pricing ASAP. It'll be dependent on number of users and level of support/onboarding/custom feature development required.
But if you're a small team, Rootly is powerful and ready to go out of the box with defaults and you might not require some of the custom stuff.
To answer your question directly, we customize each package for each individual customer on a bunch of variables.
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 show what the pricing would do solves that problem fully, and takes minimal amount of time to implement.
That you haven't spent that short amount of time in order to be transparent, looks shady to me (and others, some of them even write the same in this comment thread), as otherwise you'd surely display your pricing upfront.
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.
Actually we did offer a free plan for up to 5 users and even 10 at one point. What we've found is the collaboration overhead during incidents at companies at that scale wasn't too useful and pivoted away. Instead we offer a 14-day trial so customers can get their feet wet without contacting us: https://rootly.com/users/sign_up.
You seem to have an implicit assumption that there will necessarily be some amount of "support/onboarding/custom feature development" needed.
For the vast majority of your users, I would expect the amount of installation-engineering required to be zero. For every big business on an Enterprise plan of a SaaS like e.g. Cloudflare, there are 10 or 20 accounts for customers just as big(!) who are on their Business plan — which is basically the same feature-set, but without any of the high-touch custom stuff. Because they don't need any of it, in order to get all the value they need from the SaaS.
In other words, it feels like you have an Enterprise plan, but no Business plan. It's pretty easy to construct one — just assume any high-touch stuff doesn't happen. What's the base cost, per user?
From our experience we still see them in a number of deals. I think their focus has shifted more towards SLOs and Microsoft Teams though, areas where we aren't investing in right now.
I'm also intrigued by the text in this launch announcement:
> Our focus in the early days was build a hyper opinionated product to help them follow what we believe are the best practices. Now our product direction is focused on configuration and flexibility, how can we plug Rootly into your already existing way of working and automate it. This has helped our larger enterprise customers be successful with their current processes being automated.
As I have gotten more experience managing complex incidents I've come around to the idea that having a standard process you follow for big issues is somewhat more important than what the process really is.
I loved the PagerDuty response documentation ( https://response.pagerduty.com/ ) not so much because of the specifics but because it suggests they have a culture where there is a well-understood protocol they always try to follow for big problems.
I think about archery and "shot grouping" - once you learn to always land in the same place, you can move your aim to start landing somewhere else.
A number of the things that I see as valuable incident management involve having responders with a shared set of priorities. Tooling can influence how easy/hard some of these things are but it's really up to the people to do things like:
* Actually finding and fixing the problem and being sure the fix worked
* Clearly communicating the current user impact to the people who care
* Figuring out who the right responders are, and getting them in the room quickly
* Making one production change at a time with the incident coordinator's signoff, so you know which one helped and when it happened
* Helping the rest of the organization learn from what happened (you may not know what there is to learn)
Do you see room for the tooling company to also provide best-practices training, mentorship, or other kinds of support? That stuff scales less well than a web app but is arguably more important to changing a company's culture in a way that gets better user outcomes.
Ironically having good tooling is the least important element in a successful incident response program (but it does help).
Motivated people and a good process far supersedes tooling. And yes so certainly see room for this. We are doing this already as part of our partnership model.
Part 1 is getting you setup and using Rootly. Part 2 is helping you successfully drive adoption now and 365 days onwards. We'll run workshops and AMAs with guest speakers on topics completely unrelated to Rootly when we are able to identify needs (we bare the cost). For example we did a session with a F500 organization on on-call compensation and another startup on communicating incidents to leadership.
The biggest mistake for a tool in this space is to think of this as only a PLG/SaaS based offering.
We have seen Slack start investing in this area with their own Workflow Builder they announced last year. One of the big use cases they highlighted was incident response. We haven't ran into any customers trying to leverage that just yet though as still a lot of heavy lifting required.
IMO what makes Slack so power is their app ecosystem. We aren't too worried about them shutting that down or competing with us. We see the awesome folks on the Slack Platform team continue to invest heavily there.
But if Slack wants to seriously compete in this space we'd welcome it. The more attention and competition the better. Most accounts we approach we've found they didn't know off the shelf solutions existed!
I'm not familiar with Workflow Builder. Does it have a separate data retention scheme? Slack seems to have a big problem in that information quickly ages out, the search is pretty bad, and, in some cases, the data is actually ephemeral and will just disappear. Incident response is one of the categories that I want to preserve. Does Rootly address any of these problems?
OK, I see at the end of the demo that there is a chat transcript, so that's useful. Does it differentiate between incidents if there are multiple active incidents? Where is that archived stored?
Rootly would address that problem, we keep a database of all of your incidents and metadata (impact, timeline, participants, metrics, etc.) on our Web platform separate from Slack. You can customize a data retention policy with us if you want but it's helpful to be able to quickly search for similar incidents without trying to find it in Slack channels.
It does differentiate between incidents if there are multiple too. We'll even warn you if you're opening an incident and another one that could be related is also active to avoid duplications.
And of course we keep the garden walls low on the product. You can export any of this data out via CSV, JSON, API or via our integrations (Airtable, Google Sheets, Looker, etc.).
Only on free plans. Corporations that have customers with SLAs that they're doing incident-response for probably aren't using Slack's free plan.
But even if they are, the data's also not actually purged from their systems. It's still in the Slack-workspace archive export, if/when you do one of those. They just hide it from you. Paying for a plan un-hides it.
That is spot on. We're investing in our Web platform which has the exact same experience and quite a few companies running incidents from there.
But the Slack ecosystem has been great for us so far. Easy to develop on and fairly flexible in terms of what we can do. I think the most challenging part is going through the review cycle, can take longer than expected when you're constantly shipping new features!
Although this post is largely focused on our integration with Slack, we have a standalone Web platform that does the exact same. We have quite a few companies (especially MS Teams shops) run incidents solely from there.
This also serves as a backup when Slack goes down, users can continue using Rootly (top 5 most common questions we get).
Sorry to hear that. I'll do my best to resist asking if you'd like to chat instead ;).
We try to take a very "partnership" centric approach. What that looks like day-to-day is our engineers/success/leadership team collaborating in a shared Slack Connect channel on new features. For a lot of our customers we get deep into the problem and bring in outside speakers from the industry to come do workshops, AMAs, etc. that might align well with the challenges.
Incident.io is likely our closest competitor and are doing amazing work over there. They have a strong team and smart founders that have been in the trenches before. From a product perspective they are my favourite of our competitors if I had to pick one myself to use.
Our differences are largely driven by the customer segment we serve and the needs of SMB vs. enterprise. We've found by going upmarket to enterprises such as Canva, Shell, Bolt, it is quite difficult to develop an opinionated platform based on only industry best practices as each organizations approach to incidents (regardless if it's the same tooling) vary greatly in their process. You'll find Rootly to be a lot more pluggable, customizable, and can turn any knob the make the product work for you if needed. The reason for this is because we find change is hard, even small process tweaks in process. We want to reduce as much of that as possible when a new tool is brought in.
Firstly, thanks for the kind words Quentin – appreciate it, and congrats on your progress so far.
incident.io is pitched slightly differently to Rootly, insomuch as we're not building an engineering product, but instead something that's designed to work for entire organisations. I saw first hand what this looks like at Monzo – a bank here in the UK – where incidents weren't just declared when Cassandra fell over (ahem, https://monzo.com/blog/2019/09/08/why-monzo-wasnt-working-on...), but were also declared for things like excessive customer support queries and not enough people to serve them, regulatory issues, or a customer threatening staff in reception. All of these things require teams to form quickly, communicate well, and follow a process. We're building for this.
In terms of market and customer segments, we're working with a wide range of companies with up to 6k employees. That said, we're a perfect fit right now for folks in the 200-1500 people range.
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. <20 eng) but have also realized the challenges of managing incidents are less pronounced.
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, alerting, response?
For non-technical purchasers, it makes sense to price by the value the organisation will get out of the tool. However for tools that technical users are involved in you have to fight against the "I could build this myself" factor.
There are lots of tools that are basically CRUD apps, or maybe CRUD with a chat interface in this case, which are fundamentally straightforward to build a first-pass version of. I'm sure the product here is far better than a first-pass version, but it's an uphill battle to justify that when the pricing is on the value to the user, rather than based on the cost to build.
Another complicating factor for this market in particular is that there are often two types of users: regular and infrequent. In my experience tools like this would be used heavily by the engineering team, but there was value in having everyone in the org have access to the tool. There may be 10x the number of non-engineers, but they're often worth 1/10th or less to have on the platform. Each person isn't worth having by themselves but having everyone there is worth something. Nickel-and-diming customers on the basis of lots of users who rarely use the platform isn't great.
Edit: also, don't have a pricing page with no pricing on it.
This was an awesome response and you absolutely nailed it.
A vast majority of our customers actually have some sort of internal bot built. It's quite limited usually and largely focused on the "creation" portions of an incident. Most commonly create an incident channel, create Zoom, link to a few integrations, and that seems to be it.
But depending on who you speak with that can be enough which is totally fair. Especially when complexity and incident volumes are low.
And yes agree not every user on the platform will value it the same. An SRE vs. someone in legal will find different value out of it. Our goal is to make this accessible to the entire org not just engineering teams.
Thank you for the feedback on the pricing page as well!
One last thought, if engineering teams paid "what it was worth" for a tool for every piece of their stack, they'd have no money for engineers or building an actual product. It is very easy to spend the entire personnel budget again on tools, and most companies just can't do this. At that point, you're competing with your competitors for business, and with other unrelated service providers for budget.
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.
Not the OP, but in one of the smaller companies (~30 people/~12 engineers) you describe that's currently looking for a tool like this.
I can't actually see the pricing because it's behind a nebulous "contact us" link, but if this is more than about $5/user/month I would definitely balk at the price.
Larger companies already have dedicated platform and tooling teams with enough technical talent and bandwidth to build this sort of solution (I've seen something eerily similar to this at a previous employer that had about ~75 engineers). IMHO it's the small companies that need off the shelf incident management because they have very few people to dedicate to solving this problem and need a way to manage the communication chaos that incidents can cause.
You'd balk at more than $5/user/mo? For 12 engineers, that's only $60/mo (and for all 30 employees, $150/mo). I'd guess that you're not a C-level since you said you'd balk at that price, which is incredibly cheap. I pay more for my business's status page.
Thank you for the feedback, we'll make some changes to the page.
Agree on those companies having technical talent and in fact a vast majority of our customers came to us with their own bot built out that resembles of our features. It really comes down to the age old question, build vs buy? The maintenance cost and feature enhancements for something owned in-house can be burdensome but I am obviously bias towards it.
We've seen it takes usually at least an engineer one whole quarter to standup the basics of nailing creating incidents right with some basic automation.
But the times customers decide building it themselves isn't worth it is often a) someone that owned it had left the company and b) its a big distraction from their core focus/ has become a full-time job to maintain.
So glad you asked. Once the incident is in a resolved, we'll prompt you to edit your postmortem. This can be done inside of Rootly but most commonly we'll auto-generate a Confluence or Google Doc. Here you'll have all your incident metadata, template to fill out, but most importantly your incident timeline (no copy-paste required).
From there we can help you do things like automatically scheduling your postmortem meeting with everyone that was involved.
We also want to help you improve your process and response. We'll prompt anyone involved in the incident for feedback (they can submit anonymously too) and collect important metrics.
There are top line metrics like incident count, MTTX, outstanding action items but also finer grained ones which is what I think you might be hinting at. For example you can visualize automatically what services are being impacted the most. That might be an indicator as an area to focus on more.
We try to keep the garden walls on the product quite low, allowing you to export any of the data out of Rootly and into your own analytics engines.
Great question, There are quite a few differences, namely in our product design focus. We've taken a more configurable and flexible approach that focuses on plugging into a companies existing stack and their process. Often times we'll have customers send us their entire playbook on what they have now and ask us to automate that as a starting point (e.g. rename Slack channels to my Jira number for incidents, etc). We do this to hopefully reduce the amount of change required when a new tool is brought in. As a result we focus on features such as our Workflows engine that allows for this customization. Another big area of focus for us is unsurprisingly Slack, we think of the other areas of Rootly such as our Web platform to be the backend that powers this.
FH does a lot of things well and has great customers too. They have a sleek UI, strong security posture, and more. Their approach is more opinionated in guiding you through incident best practices. There is no wrong answer here as we hear plenty from customers that want both.
If you email jj@rootly.com we can get you some pricing ASAP. It'll be dependent on number of users and level of support/onboarding/custom feature development required.
But if you're a small team, Rootly is powerful and ready to go out of the box with defaults and you might not require some of the custom stuff.
To answer your question directly, we customize each package for each individual customer on a bunch of variables.