My team adopted Geekbot as we transitioned from in-office to primarily remote. We tried a handful of tricks and tools early on, with Geekbot the stickiest. Spending 30 seconds submitting my report while getting up to speed each morning is an easy routine. Nowadays, I prefer Geekbot to in-person standups (and definitely don't miss the interminable ramble that they too easily fall into).

I think you're right to wonder about alternatives, though. The aspects of Geekbot we use would be fairly easy to replace with a bot of our own. Geekbot pricing has a very narrow sweet spot, which I imagine varies significantly by team.

I suggested this to my program manager - and it went to deaf ears.

There is an ingraned urge to interrupt everyone and force people to waste 30 minutes of their daily time.

We use this aty company, even though we're a small team of 6. We have enough people working from home that it helps keep us in sync every day.

There are a few others to try. I don't think any has a distinct advantage, just varying levels of polish. But I would recommend using it, especially for (semi-)remote teams.

We have something similar internally as well. Everyone messages the IRC bot their yesterday + today + blockers, and it sends out an email midday to the team. Much more efficient.

We use this except with IRC: https://github.com/racker/standupbot

The concept is pretty similar. Not everyone uses it, but I like having it to keep track of my work.

I started cooperating with external freelancers recently, and after 2-3 weeks of less-than-perfect communication, decided for GeekBot as well. I'm curious how will it play out in the long run, because first results are pretty promising.

This is very cool! We use HipChat (migrating to Slack soon) and Assembla (which has a standup module). We have coded a bot which checks who has not added their standup in Assembla and reminds them on HipChat.