why we launch on halloween

Spookat goes public on Saturday, October 31, at 08:00 UTC. Yes, that’s Halloween. We could pretend it was a coincidence, but we named the product after a ghost cat, so nobody would believe us.

the name came first

Spookat is a spooky cat. The mascot is a small ghost with cat ears and a jagged hem, and it has four faces: neutral, shh, wink and shook. You’ve seen them on every cover of this blog. It’s on the launcher of the brutal style, on the stickers, and on the countdown on our homepage.

We didn’t pick the name for Halloween. We picked it because a chat widget should be like a friendly ghost: invisible until you need it, there the moment you call. Then we looked at the calendar, saw that the end of October was when the product would be ready, and the date picked itself.

ghosting is the actual problem

There’s a less cute reason too. The word we use most on this site isn’t “chat”. It’s “ghosted”.

A visitor fills in a contact form and never hears back. An email to support sits for four days. A chat bubble says “we typically reply in a few hours” and means “never”. Every one of those is a small ghosting, and every small business does it, us included, usually because the messages land somewhere nobody looks.

Spookat exists to stop that. Messages land in the Slack or Discord channel your team already has open, as a thread, or in our inbox and its phone app, so answering takes the same effort as replying to a colleague. If the visitor already left, the reply can follow them by email. Launching a tool against ghosting on the spookiest night of the year felt right.

the countdown

If you’ve been on spookat.com in the last few weeks, you’ve seen the cat holding a board that counts down to launch: days, hours, minutes, seconds, each digit flipping when it changes. It runs on the time in our shared config, the same one the pricing reads, so the countdown and the price change can’t disagree. At zero it disappears, and the next build of the site doesn’t include it at all.

It’s also one of the few things on the homepage that moves, and it stops moving if your system asks for reduced motion.

what changes on the 31st

• We go public. Spookat stops being an early-access product you hear about from us and becomes one you can find, try and pay for like any other. The trial is 14 days, no card, as it has been since day one.
• agency doesn’t go up. We’d planned to double it at launch. We didn’t: it stays $49.99 a site, before and after the 31st, for everyone. Why we changed our minds gets its own post next week.
• The other plans keep their early prices until November 30. Subscribe before then and that price stays yours.

Nothing about the product changes. The widget you’d install on the 31st is the one that’s been running on test pages all month: under 4 kb, 0 requests to our API before a click, no cookies.

why a saturday

Honestly, because that’s where Halloween fell this year. A Saturday has less traffic and fewer people at their desks. It also has fewer launches competing for the same attention, and our people are builders, who ship on weekends anyway. So do we.

see you on the 31st

The countdown on the homepage says how long is left. We’ll be there when it hits zero.

Get early access before the doors open, and lock in the early price.