---
title: "Introducing Spectate 2"
description: "We rebuilt Spectate from scratch. Here's why, what changed, and what it means for you."
url: https://spectate.net/blog/introducing-spectate-2
last_updated: 2026-10-25
---

# Introducing Spectate 2

> We rebuilt Spectate from scratch. Here's why, what changed, and what it means for you.

Two years ago Spectate was an uptime monitor with status pages. Since then, the most common question we got was some version of "and then what?". The check fails, the alert goes out, and then a person has to wake up, figure out what broke, pull in a colleague, tell customers and write it all down afterwards. Most teams glue four tools together for that.

Spectate 2 is our answer: one tool for the whole loop, from the first failed check to the last status page update.

## What we built

**On-call that doesn't charge per person.** Schedules with rotations and overrides, escalation paths that branch on severity and working hours, and phone calls you acknowledge by pressing 1. On-call tools usually charge per responder, which makes teams ration who gets paged. We charge per monitor instead.

**Evidence, not just a red dot.** When your site goes down, the checker that saw it keeps the response and takes a screenshot. The alert explains the error in plain words and tells you what to check first.

**Incidents where your team already talks.** `/incident declare` in Slack opens the incident, its own channel and a timeline that stays in sync with the dashboard.

**Status pages people actually read.** Component status follows the incidents you post, visitors read the page in their own language, and subscribers hear about it straight away.

## Why we rebuilt instead of patching

The old platform grew one feature at a time. Adding on-call and escalations properly meant rethinking how alerts, incidents and status pages relate, so we started over: a new API, new checkers that run every check type from four regions, a new host agent and a new dashboard. We kept the parts customers rely on: deployed agents keep working, status page URLs stay the same and your history came along.

## Still made in the Netherlands

Spectate is still built by a small, self-funded team in the Netherlands. Billing is in euros, the data processing agreement is part of our terms, and every provider that touches your data is listed on our [subprocessors](https://spectate.net/legal/subprocessors) page.

## What it means for you

- **Existing customers**: you're already on Spectate 2. Paying customers keep their plan until the end of their paid period, and we'll email you well before anything changes.
- **New here?** Start a [14-day trial](https://app.spectate.net/register) without a credit card, or [try the live demo](https://spectate.net/#preview) right on our homepage.

The full list of changes is in the [changelog](https://spectate.net/changelog/spectate-2). Questions: help@spectate.net.