Async standups that survive contact with a real team
Morgenruf asks each person in a DM at a sensible local hour. One summary lands in the channel. Nobody sits in a call to hear what they could have read.
Add to Slack installs Morgenruf on the free hosted instance CloudDrove runs. Self-hosting is the same MIT code.
Today, for a team of eight.
Morgenruf is a free, open-source (MIT) Slack app for async standups. It asks each person your questions by DM at their own local hour and posts one summary to the channel, with blockers pulled out. It runs free on a hosted instance CloudDrove operates, or on your own servers, and also handles coffee chats and kudos.
Last reviewed September 26, 2026
A direct message, not a meeting
At the hour you choose, each person gets a DM with your questions. They answer in their own time. When the window closes, one formatted summary goes to the channel.
- Your own questions, in your own words
- Answers in a thread or the channel, grouped by person or by question
- Blockers highlighted so they are not buried in paragraph three
- A private nudge for whoever has not filed yet
- An optional mood check alongside the questions, to spot a rough week early
Each standup carries fourteen days of completion, so one that is slipping says so.
The page you check with your coffee
Who has answered, who is still to file, and who is blocked, on one screen. The blocked list is the point: it is the thing a standup exists to surface and the thing a transcript buries.
- Counts that reconcile: expected, answered, waiting, blocked
- Recent recognition, so the good news is not only in a channel nobody scrolled
- When the next coffee chat round goes out, and whether it is overdue
Today, for a team of eight.
The things that decide whether a standup survives
Most async standup tools do the same first ten percent. What separates one that a team still uses in six months is the handling of ordinary human situations. The same list is worked through against a hosted tool in the comparison with Geekbot.
- Timezones per person. Not per workspace. A 9:30 standup in Toronto is 19:00 in Kolkata, and a tool that asks at 19:00 gets ignored.
- Leave. Somebody on holiday should not receive a message, and should not drag the completion rate down while they are gone.
- Edits. People send too early and remember something a minute later.
- Silence. A private reminder works. A public callout breeds resentment.
- Knowing it is working. Fourteen days of completion on the card, with a badge when it starts slipping, so you find out before the habit dies.
What you can do with the answers
- A digest email per standup, to a lead who does not live in Slack.
- Signed webhooks on every completed standup, for whatever you build next.
- Automation rules: if nobody has answered by ten, post in another channel.
- Ask an assistant. The MCP server lets Claude or Cursor answer questions like "who has been blocked on the same thing for days" against your own history.
- CSV export, because it is your data.
- Read them next to recognition. Insights asks the questions that need standup answers and kudos at the same time.
If the reason you are here is the per-seat bill, the write-up on running async standups in Slack for free is the shorter version of this page.
About standups
What time does it ask people?
Whatever hour you set, in each person's own timezone. A team across four continents gets asked at a sensible local hour rather than yours.
Can we have more than one standup?
As many as you like, each with its own channel, schedule, questions and participants. A morning engineering call and a Tuesday design sync are two standups, not a compromise.
What happens when somebody is on leave?
They are skipped, not nagged. Vacation is set from the Slack App Home or the dashboard, and nobody on leave counts against the completion figure.
Can people edit an answer after sending it?
Within a window you choose: until the report posts, for four hours, or indefinitely.
What does the summary look like?
One message in your channel, grouped by person or by question, with blockers pulled out. It can post in a thread to keep the channel quiet, and can go to a different channel from the one the questions came from.
Does it chase people who have not answered?
If you want it to. A nudge goes as a private DM a set number of minutes before the report posts, to the people who have not filed, and to nobody else.