# On-call for small teams

> A practical setup for one to ten people, in the order you'd do it.

URL: https://pagerless.dev/guides/on-call-for-small-teams
Updated: 2026-10-22

1. **Decide what wakes someone** Only what users feel right now: the app down, crash loops, a burst of server errors, payments failing. Everything else is a message or a weekly summary.
2. **Choose the order** One person first, one backup. Five minutes is a reasonable wait before moving on.
3. **Give the alert context** What broke, since when, what changed. An alert that says only "error rate high" costs 20 minutes at 3 a.m.
4. **Set quiet hours for everything else** Non-urgent messages wait for the morning.
5. **Review every page** Weekly: did it need a human? If not, make it quieter. If something was missed, make it louder.
6. **Rotate fairly** With more than two people, rotate who is first each week. Use the [on-call schedule maker](https://pagerless.dev/tools/on-call-schedule) to draft it.

> Pagerless does steps 1 to 5 out of the box; it has no rotation schedules yet, so rotate the first person by hand.