On-call scheduling without paying per responder

On-call has a simple goal: when something breaks, one person who can fix it finds out right away, and everyone else keeps sleeping. The tools that do this are often priced per responder — every person who might be paged is another seat on the bill.

That pricing quietly shapes how teams work. The rotation stays small to keep costs down, so the same few people carry every night and every weekend. That's exactly how on-call burns people out.

What good on-call needs

• A schedule — who is on duty right now, rotating daily or weekly, in the team's own timezone, with overrides for holidays and swaps.
• Escalation — if the person on call doesn't acknowledge within a few minutes, alert the next person, then the team.
• Alerts that get through — push notifications and phone alarms for the person on call, chat for the rest of the team.
• A single place to acknowledge, so two people don't fix the same thing at once.

How it works in Zharp

On-call schedules and escalation policies live in the same place as your monitors. A schedule has responders who take turns, a shift length in days, weeks or months, and optional active hours — so you can cover weekdays only, or business hours in one timezone. Overrides handle swaps, and you can export a schedule to Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar.

When a monitor goes down, Zharp pages whoever is on call on your primary schedule, or runs the monitor's escalation policy if it has one: notify this person, wait, then the next, then the whole team.

No per-person fee

Schedules, escalation and phone alarms are included on every Zharp plan, Free included. You pay for the plan — how many monitors and how often they're checked — not for how many people share the pager. The Team plan is $15 a month for up to 10 people; at a typical $29 per responder, the same ten-person rotation would cost $290 a month in on-call seats alone.

Put everyone who can help on the rotation, and spread the nights across the whole team.

Getting started

Create a schedule under Team Members → On-Call Schedules, add your responders in the order they should take turns, and set the shift length. The first schedule becomes the primary one, used for any monitor without its own escalation policy. The on-call docs cover escalation steps, overrides and active hours in detail.