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Seat types and Viewers with incident.io
Seat types and Viewers with incident.io

What difference does Responder and On-call seat have and what is a Viewer (free seat)?

Stephen Whitworth avatar
Written by Stephen Whitworth
Updated over a month ago

Our pricing is based on the number of Responder and On-call seats in your company, so it is only fair that you ask what counts with each seat in incident.io!


πŸ“‡ Definitions: Responder seats, On-call seats & Viewers

As a rule of thumb, Responder and On-call seats are for users who actively engage with incident.io to be On-call, manage incidents, whereas Viewers (free seats) are users who declare and join an incident channel to contribute information, but do not actively participate in incident response.

πŸ“Ÿ On-call seat (paid)

Someone with a responder seat can have the role permissions of an Administrator, Owner or any custom role.

Users who have an On-call seat can:

  • Be added to a schedule

  • Be added to an escalation path

  • Have access to the mobile app

    • Incidents

    • Escalations

    • Schedules

      • Overrides

      • Cover me

  • Get paged via all methods (Phone, SMS, Slack, App, Email)

  • Request cover via Mobile app and Slack

  • Create overrides via dashboard, Mobile app and Slack

  • Create Pay reports from On-call

πŸ§‘β€πŸš’ Response seat (paid)

Someone with a responder seat can have the role permissions of an Administrator, Owner or any custom role. Viewers can only have the Standard set of permissions.

Users who have done the following WILL qualify as Responders:

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» Viewer only (free)

If you don't have a paid response seat or an on-call seat, you can still use parts of the product as a viewer. Viewers can create an incident, observe what is happening in the incident, and post messages in the channel.

As a viewer you can

  • Create incidents (everyone in the company can declare incidents for free)

  • Join incident channels and post in them (everyone can track and contribute important information to incidents for free)

  • Going through a tutorial incident (everyone can - and should! - learn the ropes of incident.io for free)

  • View alerts, escalations and schedules

All our plans allow unlimited viewers free of charge πŸ‘


βš™οΈ Adding and removing Responders

We will automatically graduate users who have taken any one of the actions listed earlier to Responders in your incident.io account. With On-call seats, we will specifically ask you if you want to upgrade users to On-call if you will

  • Add someone to a schedule

  • Add someone to an escalation path

They will only be removed from a Response and/or On-call seat if:

  • You downgrade them from your incident.io account (in Settings > Users); or

  • Their Slack account is deleted.


πŸ’³ Billing mechanics

You can find more details of our billing mechanics here.

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