The bot is free. The server bill is not.
Hootus never rolls on your loot, never misses a Tuesday, and has never once asked for a spot in the raid. The box he runs on is less easygoing about it and bills by the month.
One payment, nothing renews, nothing unlocks.
A character name, a nickname, anything. It does not have to match the card.
What it buys you is nothing. No supporter role, no badge, no feature switched on. A guild that never gives a penny gets the identical bot on a Tuesday night.
This owl rents a box, and it never gets to sleep.
Four line items, no mystery fund. One of them costs nothing and is on the list anyway.
- Hours the box stays on
- 24/7Hours the box stays on
- Scheduler tick, every raid
- 60sScheduler tick, every raid
- Roster sync from Blizzard
- HourlyRoster sync from Blizzard
- What Blizzard charges for it
- £0What Blizzard charges for it
- The line item you would guess
A server that is never allowed to idle
Hootus is not a website that wakes up when somebody visits. The scheduler ticks every minute so a raid locks 30 minutes before pull with nobody watching, the roster pulls from Blizzard on the hour, and he re-checks his own channel permissions twice an hour in case an officer reshuffled the roles again. That box charges exactly the same in a week where nobody logs in as it does on the night 25 people turn up. Switch it off overnight to save a bit and Tuesday stops locking itself.
- The quiet one on the same box
A database that remembers every pull
A database sits on that same machine holding the roster, the signups, the attendance timestamps, the loot, and the guild history the analytics pages read back. Same rented box, same monthly line. It is the reason last tier's attendance is still there when an officer goes looking for it, rather than sitting in a spreadsheet somebody stopped updating in March.
- The part nobody invoices
The evenings, after everyone else has finished raiding
I build this because I enjoy it, which is worth saying out loud on a page that is about to ask you for money. Nobody is grinding through a backlog here resenting it. It is still hours, though, and hours are the one thing a worm actually buys back. An evening not spent earning elsewhere is an evening spent on the bot.
- The free one
Free, until Blizzard breaks it again
Blizzard's API costs nothing, which is big of them for a small indie company. It also changes shape whenever they fancy it, and every time it does, an evening goes on teaching Hootus to read the new one. No invoice. Just homework.
It started because posting a raid took too long.
Hootus was born in a TBC guild, where creating a raid in Raid-Helper meant clicking through menus while twenty-four people sat in voice waiting. The raid lead wanted one command that posted the night. So that got built. Then signups that know a Boomkin cannot tank, a roster that syncs itself, and a PUG role that expires on its own the morning after.
Nobody paid for any of it, because there was nobody to pay. It was one guild solving its own Tuesday. When a second guild asked to borrow it, charging them for the thing they had watched get built would have been a strange way to say thanks.
So the raid-night basics stay free for every guild, chipped in or not. Posting a raid, signing up, verifying a character. None of it moves behind a wall later once enough people are relying on it.
- Posting a raid, signing up, and every class and spec check behind it
- Verification against the armory, and the hourly roster sync from Blizzard
- The web planner, on a desktop or on a phone at the bus stop
- Attendance read from raid voice, and the officer report off the back of it
- LFG groups, raid-scoped PUG roles, and the apply page for recruits
That list is the core, and it stays on the free side of the line. If a paid layer ever turns up it lands on top of the list, never in front of it.
Money is the least useful thing you can send.
A bot gets better from being used and being told about. None of this touches a card.
- Costs nothing
Run him on your own raid night
A bot used by three guilds gets fixed for three guilds. The bugs that get found are the ones somebody hit on a Tuesday with 24 people waiting, which is a harsher test than anything written in a test file.
- Costs one message
Tell the raid lead still clicking through menus
Word of mouth is the entire marketing department. If Hootus took a chore off your officers, the officer one guild over is almost certainly still doing that chore by hand.
- Costs a minute
Say what broke, in detail
A report that names the raid, the command, and what you expected beats a worm. It is the difference between a fix this week and a shrug.
- Costs a thought
Ask for the thing that is missing
A fair chunk of what Hootus does started as somebody in a guild saying 'can it also'. That is not a promise anything ships. It is just where the good ideas have come from so far, and building them is the part that keeps this whole thing running.
One raider, a couple of guilds, one bot.
Whatever you send lands here, with a person and a monthly bill, not with a company.
I’m Simen. I play HexusPlexus, a Warlock in The Night Owls on Thunderstrike, and Sykepleier, a level 90 Shaman in Muppets Inc on Mirage Raceway.
I built Hootus because creating a raid in Raid-Helper meant clicking through menus while the guild sat waiting. I wanted to type one command and have the night posted, the signups checked against class and spec, and the right people pinged.
It started in The Night Owls, where I raid with friends, not as the raid leader. I listened to what ours kept griping about and built it custom for them. When I rolled into Mists I made it multi-flavour and folded in every annoyance I had with other bots. My Mists guild leans more social than hardcore, so they wanted Hootus to cover more than raid night, and that is how he grew past it.
No team, no roadmap deck, no investor update. One person, a couple of guilds, one bot.
Use it, and tell the next raid lead.
Adding Hootus takes five minutes and no config files. After that the useful part is just raiding with him and saying so when he gets something wrong.