Skip to main content
All CollectionsAccount AdminBilling & Pricing
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:

Managing and running incidents

  • Changed the status, severity, or custom field values

  • Posted an incident Update

  • Changed the incident Status, includes accepted and declined an incident.

  • Was assigned or assigned someone else an incident role (Lead or other)

  • Handed over the Lead role

  • Created, assigned, updated, was assigned to, or completed an action or a follow-up

  • Changed the Call URL associated with the incident

  • Changed the incident Type

  • Updated the incident Summary

  • Pinned a Slack message to the timeline

  • Revoked someone’s access to a Private Incident

  • Acknowledged an escalation via Slack or through the dashboard.

  • Rename an incident

  • Merged an incident

Communicating to customers

Documenting incidents

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)

  • Decline an incident

  • 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

  • Add an Attachment (e.g. Zendesk, Github, etc.)

  • Escalate to someone (e.g. via incident.io On-call/Opsgenie/PagerDuty)

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.

Did this answer your question?