Startups, Pay What You Can

Building a company is hard. Scaling a startup is even harder. We get it. We’re a startup that’s scaling.

Once you’ve hired a few great people, you start feeling the next pressure point almost immediately: tools. After your team, software is usually the biggest expense line item, especially as you stack up products for support, analytics, security, infrastructure, marketing, sales, and everything else it takes to ship and sell.

Here’s the part that frustrates us: SaaS is broken.

Too many vendors nickel and dime startups at every turn. Pricing pages are built like mazes. “Starter” plans are artificially limited. The features you actually need are pushed into higher tiers. Integrations cost extra. Seats balloon. Usage spikes during stressful moments (exactly when you need the tool most), and suddenly your bill looks nothing like your budget.

And the teams that get squeezed the hardest are the ones who can least afford it: early-stage startups. It’s backwards.

We’re not writing this to complain. We’re writing it because we can do something about it.

Pay what you can

Rootly’s enterprise business is thriving. We’re fortunate to work with some of the best companies in the world, like DoorDash, LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Wise, SoFi. That matters for one big reason: it gives us the ability to show up differently for startups.

So today, we’re extending our startup program in a way that’s deliberately simple.

If your company is under 25 employees, you pay what you can. You decide.

No gatekeeping. No complex tiers. No “starter” plan that’s basically a demo. No pressure to “grow into” a price that doesn’t match your stage.

Just tell us what works for you, and we’ll make it work. You can apply here.

Why are we doing this?

We’re doing this because we’ve seen what early-stage teams deal with during incidents. Outages don’t scale down just because your team is small. If anything, the cost of distraction is higher. The same few people are expected to triage, coordinate, communicate with customers, keep leadership updated, protect revenue, and then jump right back into shipping the roadmap, often without sleep.

When your incident process is messy, it doesn’t just create stress. It steals time from product. It chips away at customer trust. It burns out the people you can least afford to lose.

And yet, the industry often treats incident management and on-call tooling like it’s only for companies with dedicated SRE teams and enterprise budgets. That’s never made sense to us. The earlier you build good incident habits, the less painful everything becomes as you scale.

That’s the bigger idea here: we want startups to be able to build with confidence. We want you to move fast without feeling like every production issue turns into a full-stop fire drill. We want incident response to feel like part of your operating system, not a chaotic scramble that derails the week.

No catches, just access

So what does “Pay What You Can” actually mean?

It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you’re under 25 employees, you qualify. You tell us what you can pay, and we’ll take it from there. No interrogation. No weird hoops. No gotchas.

If you’re stretching runway, tell us. If you’re in the middle of fundraising uncertainty, tell us. If you’re doing okay but still want pricing that feels sane, tell us. The point isn’t to extract maximum dollars from early-stage teams. The point is to help you run real incident response now, so you don’t have to “rebuild reliability later” when you’re already dealing with scale.

This new option is part of Rootly’s broader startup program:

• If you’re under 100 employees, have raised less than $50M, and are under five years old, you can save up to 50%.
• If you’re under 25 employees, there’s now Pay What You Can.

Build reliability early

Different startups have different constraints, and we’re trying to meet you where you actually are, not where a pricing spreadsheet says you should be.

If you’ve been putting off incident tooling because it felt too expensive, too complicated, or too “enterprise,” we made this for you. You shouldn’t have to earn the right to have a solid incident process. You shouldn’t have to wait until you’re bigger to take reliability seriously. And you definitely shouldn’t be stressed about costs every time you’re trying to keep production stable.

You focus on building. We’ll help make sure incidents don’t swallow your team whole.

Keep innovating. We certainly are!

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