How Reactiv outgrew incident.io and moved to Rootly for real AI and on-call without the upsell.

The CTO of a mobile-experience company told us the two best parts of switching incident tools were the mobile app and the AI. Coming from Michael Pezzi, that is not a courtesy compliment but an expert grading the work. His company, Reactiv, turns Shopify stores into native iOS and Android apps, so the quality of a mobile interface is the product he ships. Reactiv had run incident.io for a year. It never broke, it just stopped improving, while charging more for every step Reactiv needed to grow.

"The AI agent is the game changer, and the app itself is genuinely better. As a company that builds mobile apps and obsesses over quality, we think Rootly's app sets the bar." -Michael Pezzi, CTO

Then it froze, and kept charging

Reactiv adopted incident.io to escape improvisation. Before it, an issue surfaced, someone opened a Jira ticket and pinged one of more than forty Slack channels, and it got lost in the noise while people argued over how urgent it was. incident.io gave them a real process, separating incidents from sprint work and fitting the team's Slack-first habits.

Then it froze. Over the year Reactiv used it, the product felt stagnant, and the gaps showed up where a growing team felt them most. Workflows were hard to customize, so the tool could not be shaped to how Reactiv actually ran. The AI was barely there. And the pricing turned ordinary growth into a sequence of upsells; their plan allowed only two on-call schedules, so a third meant moving up a tier, and the pay calculator sat behind another. Nothing failed, it just kept asking for a credit card every time Reactiv needed to grow.

"incident.io never failed us, it just stopped moving. The workflows couldn’t work the way we worked, the AI wasn't really there, and our plan capped us at two on-call schedules. The third, and the pay calculator, were behind the next tier up." -Michael Pezzi, CTO

The expert's verdict: better AI, easier growth, better app

Reactiv moved across On-Call, Incident Response, Status Page, and Retrospectives, and migrated it all clean. Rather than importing a year of old process, they archived it and rebuilt their process the way they wanted. It was fast; inside a week. They added people and defined workflows and schedules starting on a Monday, were running by Friday, kept both systems live in parallel for the week, then cut incident.io off.

Two things won Michael over, and both sit squarely in his expertise. The first is the AI. Rootly's agent lets the team ask who is on call, hand an incident off, escalate, or summarize what has happened, all without leaving the channel where the team already works. He calls it the game changer, where incident.io's AI had felt like a ceiling. The second is the mobile app, and this is the judgment that carries the most weight coming from him; he found Rootly's app clearly better than incident.io's, and it is his primary way of getting paged. A person who builds mobile experiences for a living, comparing two of them head to head, picked Rootly's.

"Rootly's mobile app and AI agent replaced the tools I used to juggle. The agent let’s me and the team find out who's on call, handles handoffs, escalates, summarizes, and more." -Michael Pezzi, CTO

On-call and pricing that grow with you

On incident.io, Reactiv was capped at two on-call schedules; a third meant a higher tier, as did the pay calculator and other basics. On Rootly they get as many schedules as they need, included, including the pay calculator and many other features. For a team scaling and moving into new regions, not budgeting for the next paywall on every bit of growth is its own kind of value, and it is the cleanest line between a tool that starts you and one built to grow with you.

"When a merchant's checkout is hit, our turnaround is everything, and routing it through Rootly made the whole process cleaner and built real trust, with our engineers and our merchants. And we're not bracing for the next paywall or workaround as we grow." -Michael Pezzi, CTO

Proof points (Reactiv lightning round, 1-5)

• On-call handoffs are easier and cleaner: 5
• Time to first status update improved: 4
• Stakeholder communications are more consistent: 5
• Engineering morale is higher: 5
• Customers are happier: 5

incident.io is good at getting a team started, and Reactiv isn’t the first to say so, we also agree based on hundreds of customers we’ve talked to. What Reactiv needed next was a tool that kept improving, worked the way they work, and did not charge for every step as they grew. They found it, and the verdict that matters most came from the person who judges app experience for a living. If you build for users, you know good UX when you see it. Reactiv's CTO saw it in Rootly.