PagerDuty Pricing: Is It Worth the High Cost in 2024?

PagerDuty is a popular alerting tool used by SRE teams in medium and large companies. It lets SRE teams set up on-call rotation schedules, escalation policies, and connect them to a large collection of alert sources.

PagerDuty’s core functionality covers simple use cases for a medium SRE team. But as soon as you need more advanced features or help navigating their complicated UX, you'll be prompted to pay for an add-on to your contract.

PagerDuty customers report increasing frustration due to frequent price hikes, hidden costs, upsells, and inflated invoices at the end of each month. In this article, you’ll learn about what is included and what is not included in PagerDuty plans, how their multiple add-ons work, and whether the ROI meets PagerDuty’s expectations.

Breakdown of PagerDuty Pricing Plans

"Free" Plan – $0/month/person

🤷🏽 This is more of a teaser for very small teams getting their feet wet in the world of reliability. It may help you manage minimal on-call needs while you don't yet have formal reliability expectations. You’ll likely have your entire company (made up of five people) covering on-call shifts.

Another issue you'll encounter is that there’s an important limit on the number of notifications you can expect from PagerDuty in the free plan, so your software and alerting system better have minimal errors!

"Professional" Plan – $21/month/person

PagerDuty is straightforward here, admitting that the "Free" tier is meant for hobbyists.

✅ In the Professional plan, you get the basic needs a small team has: Single Sign-On (SSO), the ability to integrate PagerDuty with your ticketing system, and unlimited push notifications (so generous!).

⛔️ However, there are no automations included in the "Professional" plan—not even basic workflow automations. You only get the same basic escalation policies and schedules from the free plan. You'll have to do a lot of manual work to set up schedules, and good luck if you need to change them.

⛔️ The admin capabilities in this plan are minimal, so you have to really trust who you add (manually, of course) to your PagerDuty account. And don’t forget to manually remove people when they leave or change roles.

⛔️ Remember, you’re still only getting on-call schedules with PagerDuty in this tier. If you need an incident response management solution, status pages, or any other common SRE solution, you’ll have to buy it separately.

⛔️ But fear not! With the Professional plan, you get the added benefit of being able to purchase up to five add-ons, including basic automations, AI, status pages, and call routing. For any other needs, find another vendor.

"Business" Plan – $41/user/month

Whether "Business" refers to “this is where we, PagerDuty, make our business” or “you’ll need this plan if you’re actually running a business” is up for discussion.

✅ The Business plan includes essential features for most companies with more than one team: admin roles, basic workflow automations, and ITSM integrations (finally, you can sync users with your active directory instead of creating/deleting them manually).

⛔️ Even though you're now paying twice as much as in the Professional tier, you still need to purchase automations, status pages, AI, and call routing separately.

⛔️ Full RBAC or even just incident roles are still missing here. You’ll need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan to get them.

⛔️ By now, you should know you’re still only purchasing an on-call solution. For incident response management, find another vendor—it's not even an option at PagerDuty.

"Enterprise" Plan – Ask sales (scary)

A ticket to heaven is the only thing not offered in this tier, but at a surprise cost. When moving from Professional to Business, the cost doubled, so should we expect the same here?

✅ You’ll finally get a comprehensive on-call solution with basic workflow automations, incident roles and tasks, and the ability to use PagerDuty through Slack.

✅ Believe it or not, this tier actually includes status pages and live call routing! PagerDuty will even throw in the post-incident tool they bought last year, Jeli, as a courtesy while they test it out.

⛔️ Unfortunately, you still need to pay extra for automations, AI, and advanced admin features like RBAC.

⛔️ Even though PagerDuty offers pieces of the incident response process in this tier, you'll still need another vendor to fully manage an incident from alert to retrospective.

The Hidden Costs of PagerDuty

The base tiers are already expensive, but they don’t tell the full story of how costly PagerDuty can get.

Aggressive Upsells

As you’ve seen, many basic features are paid add-ons in PagerDuty. If you need any of the following, you'll need to buy one to three add-ons:

• Status pages
• Alert grouping
• Incident roles and tasks
• AI solutions
• Automated workflows
• Incident retrospectives
• Intentional schedule gaps
• Live call routing
• Unlimited international SMS and phone calls
• Bi-directional sync with Jira, Zendesk, etc.

Expensive Add-ons

Not only do you need at least two add-ons to have a functional on-call solution with PagerDuty, but the cost of add-ons is often as much as the core subscription.

Let’s review some examples of add-ons and their cost in PagerDuty:

• Alert grouping: starting at $24/user/month
• Runbook Automations: starting at $59/user/month
• Status Pages: $89/page/1,000 subscribers
• AI: starting at $699/month plus task tokens
• View-only licenses: $150 for 30 users/month

Frequent Price Hikes

Every year, PagerDuty will try to increase the overall cost of your contract. You’ll need to be ready to fight them at every renewal, as they’ll attempt to sneak in price hikes through add-ons or other fees. According to buyer reviews, being able to get PagerDuty to agree to keep the same price for another year is a big victory, a testament to your negotiation skills.

Is PagerDuty Worth the High Cost?

According to Vendr, the average contract with PagerDuty is around $64,621 per year. For medium teams, we're talking about $35k in yearly costs for PagerDuty alone. For larger teams, PagerDuty deals can run around $119k per year.

Most SRE teams are looking for PagerDuty alternatives due to the excessive cost, but also because the platform remains outdated, difficult to use, and fails to meet the needs of modern teams.

• Even after using PagerDuty for years, most users still need to Google how to perform basic tasks. PagerDuty has not invested in updating their on-call scheduler in years, and there are no plans to do so anytime soon.
• PagerDuty requires multiple workarounds, like paying for dummy accounts, to adjust schedules to work as your team needs.
• Advanced features like on-call shadowing, round-robin escalation policies, or on-call pay calculators are not available in PagerDuty, not even as paid add-ons.
• PagerDuty is designed for engineers (and even they struggle). It's impossible to coordinate a cross-functional response through PagerDuty.
• When you buy PagerDuty, you're only addressing the alerting side of your incident response strategy. You still need to figure out how to manage incidents at scale with another incident management solution.

Save Over 50% by Switching to Rootly

Rootly is the leading modern on-call and incident management solution, trusted by LinkedIn, Dropbox, NVIDIA, Webflow, and hundreds of other SRE teams. Rootly’s pricing is simple, with no hidden fees or surprise upsells. Plus, you’ll get:

• An easy-to-use UI that lets you get started in minutes and is ready for you to scale.
• Intuitive and beautiful apps for iOS and Android.
• Save more than 50% on your PagerDuty invoice when you switch to Rootly.

You can switch from PagerDuty to Rootly in less than 10 minutes with our migration assistance service. Talk to one of our reliability experts to see how Rootly can improve your MTTR while saving you costs.

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