We're folks who like building things. In any project, our favorite bit is the actual building.
We're a small team who have been founders, engineers, and engineering managers, and have always been frustrated with SaaS products that provide great value but are either too expensive for small teams, or require a complicated sales process and on-boarding. Apps should let teams build their vision, and get out of the way. Purchasing should involve a credit card, not sales teams or lawyers.
The services that do let you just sign up and start using it are often limited trials whose cost balloons as the team grows. We get it, the path to a modern SaaS company "success" is to be able to charge you more as your company grows, but can't there be some companies that just charge a fair price for a good product?
The worst offender (before Heii On-Call) was on-call rotation and alerting.
The Heii On-Call founder (me) was an engineering manager in charge of two teams at a fast growing biotech startup. The on-call schedule was a Google Calendar that—big surprise—was never up to date. It was so unreliable as a source of truth that everybody would respond when production had an issue. We needed a better on-call solution so engineers who were not on-call could actually disconnect.
It was upsetting how expensive existing solutions were. What we needed wasn't particularly hard, but even my small org would put me at over $200/month. We didn't expect the number of incidents to grow exponentially as my org grew, so why did my bill have to grow? Even more upsetting was that every one of the existing products justified their price point by being a complicated fully integrated end-to-end incident management workflow solutions platform. (A few even threw AI in there for some reason…) I didn't want any of those things. I just wanted something slightly better than a spreadsheet. I found myself thinking, yet again, that someone should build the simple version of this and just charge a flat rate.
So we built it, and we charge a flat rate.
Heii On-Call is a SaaS app that does one job well and offers straightforward no-brainer pricing for both small and large teams. We don't think Heii On-Call is a billion dollar company. We don't think Heii On-Call will change the world. We do think Heii On-Call can be a sustainable small business, and we intend to operate it as such. That means keeping our team small, and building the features that matter to you. So we can all just keep building.
Have more questions, or are interested in what we are doing? Drop me a message at hevans@heiioncall.com, or sign up now.