Show HN: Tellspin – Round robin rotation for at-mentions in Slack

Looks interesting, but for a company the size I work at it’s a non-starter. $1 / user / month means we’re paying hundreds of dollars a month for what amounts to a slight automation perk. We already have bots that respond to keywords by pinging users in a channel for the respective channel / department they represent. We have a check-in / check-out function built into the bot. It would be trivial to have to ping users on a rotations / scheduled basis (@channel fatigue is t a huge problem since most of the employees are good about managing workload).

Drop the price and you might pick up a larger company that may not have the talent to program some Python bit for Slack.

Good luck though! It definitely looks polished and well thought out.

Creator here. I made Tellspin to solve a problem I've had at my past two jobs. Our support teams had the habit of using at-channel. I found the more they used at-channel, the less people would respond. It seemed our developers got used to feeling like someone else would handle it.

Back then I made a simple slack bot to show who would be responsible to respond to #support. It worked well, but we soon found it'd be nice to have a schedule and a way to override each other's shifts.

Tellspin has been nice because it's a thin layer between pager duty and at-channel. Most support issues don't feel like they should be paging my phone and calling me, but a direct ping from Slack feels more appropriate.

Let me know what you think.