Help Centre

From the Floater Home tab, click Create Rotation. You'll be asked for:

• A handle name - Floater creates a matching Slack user group with this handle (e.g. @platform-oncall).
• The members who'll rotate through on-call duty.
• How often it rotates, and how many people cover each shift at once.
• A start date/time and timezone.
• Which channels get notified when on-call changes.
• Whether to send a notification to any newly added users - controls both the "you've been added to this rotation" DM and the "you're now on call" DM members get when their shift starts. On by default; turn it off if you'd rather add people quietly.

You'll see a preview of the schedule before confirming - nothing is created until you review and submit.

Note: creating a rotation doesn't immediately post to the channel, even if someone's already on call - that would be a bit much for a rotation nobody's seen yet. Its first channel announcement happens naturally at the scheduled time. Editing an existing rotation is different: if the change affects who's on call right now, the channel is notified straight away.

Rotations run on a simple interval: every N hours, days, weeks, or months, on-call moves to the next person (or group of people) in the list. There's no limit on team size, and you can put more than one person on call at once by increasing the shift size.

Floater also supports an optional announcement time, separate from the shift-change time itself - handy if your rotation changes hands at midnight but you'd rather the "who's on call today" reminder posted at 9am instead.

Wherever you're the only one looking - the Home tab, Manage Rotation, slash commands - times are shown in your own Slack timezone, so you and a teammate elsewhere will each see the same shift at your own local time. The rotation's configured timezone is only used for shared surfaces, like the channel announcement, and as a fallback if your timezone isn't known.

Every rotation on your Home tab has a Rotation Menu dropdown, which is where everything about it gets managed:

• 📋 Manage Queue - see upcoming shifts and configure overrides.
• 🛠️ Edit Rotation - change members, interval, or notification settings.
• 💬 Customize Channel Message - edit the message posted when on-call changes.
• 📄 Technical info - the rotation's ID, team ID, and creation date, for support/debugging.
• 🔒 Change Owners - owners only.
• ❌ Delete Rotation - owners only, with a confirmation step. By default this also disables the rotation's Slack user group (it can be re-enabled later) - tick the checkbox on the confirmation screen to keep it active instead.
• Account Admins get every one of these options on every rotation in the workspace, not just ones they own or are a member of.

Whoever creates a rotation becomes its first owner. Owners have full administrative control - they can change who else owns the rotation, manage permissions, and delete it.

Anyone on the rotation's roster who isn't an owner is a member. Members can still manage the queue, edit the schedule, and customize the channel message - just not the owner-only actions above.

Your Home tab groups rotations into Rotations you own, Rotations you're part of, and Other rotations so it's always clear what you can do with each one.

Overrides handle the one-off cases - someone's sick, covering a colleague, or swapping a shift - without touching the underlying schedule. Open Manage Queue → Configure on any rotation to add one: pick who's covering and the time window, and Floater takes care of the rest.

Once the override window ends, on-call automatically reverts to whoever the regular schedule says it should be - no manual cleanup needed.

Click Add to Calendar next to any rotation's Rotation Menu to get a private subscription URL - paste it into Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar to see that rotation's shifts alongside the rest of your schedule.

Choose between All Shifts (everyone's on-call dates for that rotation) or My Shifts (just the ones you're covering) - each option has its own link.

Anyone with the link can see those shifts, so treat it like a password. If one ever leaks, hit Regenerate to invalidate it immediately - your calendar app will just stop getting updates until you swap in the new URL.

Most calendar apps only check subscribed URLs for updates every so often, so schedule changes can take up to 24 hours to show up.

Not sure where to paste the link? Here's how on the most common calendar apps:

• Google Calendar
• Microsoft Outlook
• Apple Calendar

A cluster groups several existing rotations under one Slack @handle - useful when you want to reach "whoever's on call right now" across multiple teams or timezones with a single mention, instead of pinging each rotation separately.

A cluster has no schedule of its own. Its handle's membership is a live union of whoever is currently on-call in each rotation you add to it, and updates automatically the moment any of those rotations' on-call changes - there's nothing to keep in sync manually.

Click Create Cluster on the Home tab, give it a handle name, and pick which rotations feed into it. You'll find your clusters listed under their own Rotation Clusters section, each with:

• 📅 Add to Calendar - a combined feed of every constituent rotation's shifts, same All Shifts/My Shifts choice as a regular rotation's calendar link.
• A ⋯ menu with 🔨 Edit Rotation Cluster (open to anyone) and ❌ Delete Rotation Cluster (restricted to whoever created it, or an Account Admin).

Deleting a rotation that belongs to a cluster just removes it from that cluster - the cluster and its remaining rotations keep working. Deleting a cluster never touches its constituent rotations, only the cluster itself.

Open Rotation Menu → Customize Channel Message to edit what gets posted when on-call changes, using Slack's full rich text editor (bold, italics, links, lists).

Insert dynamic variables from the dropdown to keep the message accurate automatically:

• Rotation name
• Rotation user group
• Assignee(s) - who's on call right now
• Next assignee(s) / Assignee(s) after next
• Previous assignee(s)

Click My Notifications on the Home tab to turn off your own "you're now on-call" DMs - useful on fast-cycling rotations where an hourly ping gets old fast. This only affects your personal DMs; channel announcements and everyone else's notifications are unaffected.

When the toggle is on, you'll also see every rotation you're a member of listed underneath, each with its own on/off override - handy if you only want the DM turned off for one noisy rotation rather than all of them. If you're part of more than five rotations, the list pages five at a time.

• /floater - who's on call right now, across every rotation.
• /floater [handle] - detail and upcoming shifts for one rotation, e.g. /floater platform-oncall.
• /floater me - your own on-call status across every rotation you're part of.
• /floater next - who's up next across every rotation.
• /floater clusters - who's currently covered by each Rotation Cluster.
• /floater help - a quick reminder of all of the above, right in Slack.

Every workspace starts with a 14-day free trial and unlimited rotations - no credit card required. After the trial, plans scale by number of active rotations, not by team size, so you can add as many people as you need at no extra cost. See current pricing.

If your trial ends and you haven't picked a plan yet, you're not locked out - you stay on a free tier with 2 active rotations, permanently, no credit card needed. Your two oldest rotations (by creation date) keep running exactly as before; anything beyond that pauses (no Slack user group syncing, no notifications) until you either upgrade or free up space by deleting a rotation.

You can subscribe to a plan at any time from Manage Account on the Home tab (Account Admins only) - pick monthly or annual pricing right there, then complete payment on a secure checkout page (billing is handled by Lemon Squeezy, a Stripe company). Subscribing while your trial is still running starts billing immediately and ends the trial early, so your plan's rotation limit applies right away rather than waiting out any remaining trial days.

To change or cancel an existing plan, open Manage Account → Manage Billing for a direct link to your Lemon Squeezy billing portal, where you can upgrade, downgrade, update your payment method, or cancel yourself - no need to email us. Cancelling doesn't cut off access immediately: you keep your current plan until the end of the billing period you've already paid for, then drop to the free tier described above, same as if you'd never subscribed.

Uninstalling Floater from Slack doesn't cancel your Lemon Squeezy subscription - they're separate systems. If you're uninstalling because you no longer need Floater, remember to also cancel (or email us) to stop billing.

Whoever installs Floater becomes an Account Admin, and by default every other Slack workspace admin is one too - so nobody gets locked out of managing the app just because the original installer moves on.

Admins can manage billing, change the date format, and choose who else is an admin, all from Manage Account on the Home tab - which is also only visible to admins, so other members won't see plan or billing details on their Home tab. Admins also get full edit and delete access to every rotation and cluster in the workspace, not just ones they created or belong to - see The Rotation Menu.

Want a shorter list instead of "every Slack admin"? Open Manage Account → Manage Admins, add specific people, then tick Restrict access to only the admins listed above. It's off by default - switch it on deliberately, since turning it on without adding yourself first would lock you out.