PagerDuty pricing: Is it worth your investment in 2025?

PagerDuty, since its inception in 2009 has dominated the incident management landscape. The platform has become a synonym for on-call and even referred to as getting “paged” for alerts by most SRE and DevOps teams. They have scaled well and kept on shipping new features throughout and even with the new AI agents in the tech landscape, they’ve managed to fit well. 

But, with most outdated legacy models come a few constraints and it all comes to "Paying for What You Use" vs. "Paying for What You Might Use". We will touch on that point in detail in the blog. Also, with so many features fitted into PagerDuty, users have called it bloated and pretty expensive for features that they use. Now, the PagerDuty pricing and features are more focused on enterprises making it pretty bloated for new teams and hence, expensive.

In this blog, we will take a detailed look at PagerDuty pricing structure for 2025 and uncover the hidden costs behind the pretty pricing banners in their marketing material. Also, we’ll look into some user reviews about PagerDuty pricing models.

PagerDuty's evolution from simple alerts to complex pricing

PagerDuty started off as a simple way to alert teams about incidents and over the years, it has evolved into a full-scale digital operations platform, now serving over 28,000 organizations. While its capabilities have expanded, so has the complexity of its pricing for organizations.

And sometimes, this happens:

@pagerduty Did you know your site is returning 500 errors to customers?

— Don Walter (@donwalter) March 3, 2025

Recently, PagerDuty has introduced new AI-driven features, including its latest "agentic AI functionality" within the Operations Cloud. These AI tools are designed to handle repetitive tasks and speed up incident response. However, while the technology continues to advance, the cost of being able to use these services has left many teams wondering whether the benefits justify the price or is it better to look for an alternative?

Here's a detailed thread:

@zenduty is something I have use in my past company and can trust the product and their founder as well @VishwaKk & @ankurrawal1987. The one thing about their product is that is straightforward and quite all in one tool for incident management base on Google SRE principles.

— Rahul (@rpsadarangani) May 13, 2023

Breaking down PagerDuty pricing tiers

PagerDuty's pricing model is tiered, with different levels offering varying features and capabilities for different teams to examine each tier and understand what they’re getting—and more importantly, what you're not getting—at each price point.

"Free" Plan – $0/month/person

The Free plan is more of a trial for professional teams. It's suitable only for hobbyists or very small teams just getting started with formal incident management but it does hit the cap very quickly and by the time you hit that, you’ll be forced to shift to a higher plan.

Here’s what all is included:

• Basic alerting features
• Limited on-call scheduling capabilities
• Up to 5 users

And here’s what’s missing:

• Limited notifications (you'll quickly hit the cap)
• No automations or integrations
• No advanced scheduling or escalation policies

PagerDuty not great for small teams?
byu/rayray5884 indevops

"Professional" Plan – $21/month/user

The Professional plan is marketed as PagerDuty's entry-level offering for small teams, but it still lacks many features that even small teams need to operate efficiently and effectively.

Here’s what all is included:

• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Basic ticketing system integrations
• Unlimited notifications
• External Status Page (up to 250 subscribers)
• 2 predefined Incident Roles and Types
• Basic escalation policies and schedules

And here’s what’s missing:

• No workflow automations (even basic ones, required add-on)
• Limited admin capabilities
• No status pages (requires add-on)
• No AI capabilities (requires add-on)
• No call routing (requires add-on)

At $21/user/month, you're still only getting a basic on-call solution that requires a lot of manual work and most teams quickly find themselves needing add-ons, which substantially increases the actual cost of your tool. 

"Business" Plan – $41/user/month

Now, the Business plan doubles the price of the Professional tier but still doesn't include all the features that modern incident management teams require. Let’s have a look at it:

Here’s what all is included:

• Custom Fields
• Up to 3 custom Incident Types
• Custom Incident Workflow Triggers
• 1 custom Incident Role
• Advanced admin features
• Advanced ITSM integrations
• Internal Status Pages
• External Status Page (up to 500 subscribers)

And here’s what’s missing:

• Full RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
• Incident roles and tasks
• Status pages (still requires add-on)
• AI capabilities (still requires add-on)
• Call routing (still requires add-on)
• Comprehensive incident response management

At this price point ($41/user/month), many teams expect a complete solution but are disappointed to find they still need to purchase multiple add-ons to meet their needs and in the end, they’re pasted with an expensive bill to pay.

"Enterprise" Plan – Custom pricing

The Enterprise plan finally includes most of the features teams need, but at a price point that's often shockingly high. But, this plan does provide all the efficient features required by a modern engineering team.

Here’s what all is included:

• Chat Experience with Slack Actions
• Incident Workflows (Conditionals, Loops, Delays)
• 8 custom Incident Roles
• Incident Tasks
• Up to 100 Custom Incident Types
• Post-Incident Reviews
• Bi-directional Custom Field Sync 

And here’s what’s missing(and still requires add-ons):

• AIOps
• Customer Service Operations
• PagerDuty Advance (more credits)

According to industry data, Enterprise plans can cost anywhere from $60-90 per user per month, and that's before any add-ons. Let’s go even further into understanding how PagerDuty pricing is hidden behind the sticker price you see on the pricing page.

The hidden costs of PagerDuty

The tiered pricing structure is just the beginning of understanding PagerDuty's true cost. Several hidden costs impact the total cost of ownership for the organization.

Aggressive upsells and add-on requirements

PagerDuty's core platform intentionally omits critical features that most teams need, forcing customers to purchase add-ons and this often costs as much as (or more than) the base subscription. Let’s have a look at it:

• Alert grouping: $24/user/month
• Runbook Automations: $59/user/month
• Status Pages: $89/page/1,000 subscribers
• AI capabilities (PagerDuty Advance): Starting at $699/month plus usage-based "task tokens"
• View-only licenses: $150 for 30 users/month

For a team of 25 users on the Business plan who need automations, status pages, and basic AI capabilities, the annual cost quickly balloons from $12,300 to over $30,000 after add-ons. And that is a really bad hit to your ROI. Let’s see what’s the actual reason why PagerDuty is this expensive and it hides in the number of features it is bloated with.

"Pay for what you use" vs. "Pay for what you might use"

PagerDuty's pricing philosophy can be summarized as "pay for what you might use" rather than "pay for what you actually use." This distinction will answer why many teams experience sticker shock with their PagerDuty bills.

Under the "pay for what you might use" model:

• You pay for potential capacity, not actual usage
• Every user requires a full license, even if they rarely interact with the system
• Features are parceled out across add-ons, forcing you to purchase bundles that may include capabilities you don't need
• Costs scale linearly with team size, regardless of actual usage patterns

This approach creates perverse incentives which means that teams may limit who has access to critical systems or create shared accounts (violating security best practices) just to control costs.

In contrast, Zenduty's "pay for what you use" approach:

• Charges based on actual usage patterns
• Includes all features in appropriate tiers without requiring add-ons
• Offers more flexible user licensing options
• Provides predictable costs that scale reasonably with team size

Zenduty—The transparent alternative to PagerDuty

Zenduty offers comprehensive incident management capabilities with a transparent, predictable pricing model. Here's how the pricing looks like without any hidden costs behind the bar:

Built-in intelligence at no extra cost

While PagerDuty recently announced AI agents as premium add-ons, Zenduty includes powerful AI capabilities in its standard pricing. These AI-enabled incident management tools significantly reduce manual work and accelerate resolution times:

Incident summaries for actionable insights

Zenduty's AI Incident Summarizer creates concise, digestible summaries in seconds, providing stakeholders with clear overviews of customer impact and operational status.

Instant context for faster RCA

ZenAI integrates directly within Slack, allowing teams to investigate and find impacted services, clusters, and components from complex payloads instantly.

Automated postmortem reports

After resolving major incidents, ZenAI creates detailed, comprehensive reports from logs, metrics, and relevant Slack conversations in your preferred template.

Simplified on-call scheduling

ZenAI optimizes coverage, reduces manual work, and ensures seamless shift management across distributed teams through natural language interactions.

These AI capabilities deliver measurable benefits:

• 50% faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
• 20 hours saved per incident lifecycle
• 30% increased team productivity

Most importantly, these features are included in Zenduty's standard pricing tiers—not as expensive add-ons like PagerDuty's AI offering that starts at $699/month plus usage-based costs.

Pricing transparency pledge

One of the aspects of our approach is their commitment to pricing transparency. Unlike the complex and often opaque pricing structures, Zenduty operates on clear principles:

1. No hidden fees or surprise charges – The price you see is the price you pay
2. No aggressive upsells – Features are included in appropriate tiers without requiring add-ons
3. No punitive renewal increases – Pricing remains stable and predictable
4. No complex usage calculations – Straightforward per-user pricing with clear boundaries
5. No feature limitations – Each tier provides complete functionality appropriate for its target user base

This transparency pledge reflects our philosophy that incident management tools should solve problems, not create them—including billing problems.

Real-world cost comparison: PagerDuty pricing vs. Zenduty pricing

Let's compare the same team sizes from our earlier PagerDuty calculations:

Small team (10 engineers)

PagerDuty:

• Total annual cost: $8,868 ($73.90 per user per month)

Zenduty:

• 10 users on Growth plan: $14 × 10 × 12 = $1,680/year

Annual savings with Zenduty: $7,188 (81% reduction)

Mid-size team (50 engineers)

PagerDuty:

• Total annual cost: $71,256 ($118.76 per user per month)

Zenduty:

• 50 users on Enterprise plan: $21 × 50 × 12 = $12,600/year

Annual savings with Zenduty: $58,656 (82% reduction)

Large team (150 engineers)

PagerDuty:

• Total annual cost: $246,804 ($137.11 per user per month)

Zenduty:

• 150 users on Enterprise plan: $21 × 150 × 12 = $37,800/year

Annual savings with Zenduty: $209,004 (85% reduction)

These comparisons illustrate why teams are increasingly migrating from PagerDuty to Zenduty. The cost savings are substantial—typically 80-85%—while gaining comparable or superior functionality.

Future-proofing analysis on why PagerDuty's pricing model is unsustainable

As we look ahead to the future of incident management, several trends suggest that PagerDuty's current pricing model is increasingly out of step with market demands:

1. The DevOps democratization movement

Modern organizations are extending incident response capabilities beyond traditional engineering teams. Most companies are adopting a "whole organization" approach to incident management to let product managers track customer impact, executives need visibility into business-critical outages, and customer success teams require real-time status updates.

PagerDuty's per-seat licensing model forces companies to make difficult choices: either exclude important stakeholders from the incident process or absorb astronomical costs for wide deployment. The view-only licenses ($150 for 30 users) represent a half-measure that still imposes additional costs for basic visibility of your system.

2. AI Integration as a business necessity

The introduction of AI tools in incident management isn't a luxury. It's rapidly becoming a competitive necessity for most ogranizations. By treating AI capabilities as premium add-ons with costs starting at $699/month plus usage-based fees, PagerDuty is essentially tax companies attempting to modernize their operations.

Zenduty's approach of including powerful AI capabilities within standard pricing tiers recognizes that these tools should be accessible to teams of all sizes and budgets.

3. The remote work reality

The post-pandemic work landscape has permanently shifted toward distributed teams operating across multiple time zones and this new reality requires more sophisticated on-call management, communication tools, and coordination capabilities and that are precisely the features of PagerDuty pricing packages as premium add-ons.

Zenduty's inclusion of these features in its standard tiers acknowledges that these aren't luxury capabilities but essential components of modern incident management.

4. Budget scrutiny in economic uncertainty

In today's economic climate, CFOs and CTOs are scrutinizing every SaaS expenditure with unprecedented rigor and the days of rubber-stamping renewals for legacy tools are over. Teams are being asked to justify their technology investments and demonstrate clear ROI.

When organizations discover they can achieve comparable or superior incident management capabilities at 80-85% lower costs, the decision to migrate becomes increasingly compelling. As budget pressures continue, PagerDuty's premium pricing model will face growing resistance.

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Migrate from PagerDuty within the hour

If you're considering alternatives to PagerDuty's escalating costs, Zenduty offers a streamlined migration path designed to minimize disruption and maximize value. Click here to see a detailed comparison between Zenduty and PagerDuty features. And, here's a detailed process on how we help you at every step:

1. Comprehensive data migration

Zenduty helps you import your existing PagerDuty configuration, including:

• Service definitions and dependencies
• Escalation policies and schedules
• User profiles and team structures
• Integration configurations
• Historical incident data

2. Dedicated migration support

The transition process is supported by Zenduty's migration specialists who provide:

• Pre-migration assessment and planning
• Customized migration strategy
• Hands-on implementation support
• Post-migration validation

3. Parallel operations during transition

To ensure business continuity, Zenduty supports dual-running with your existing PagerDuty instance during the transition period, allowing you to:

• Validate functionality before full cutover
• Train teams in a live environment
• Phase migrations by team or service
• Build confidence in the new platform

4. Team enablement resources

Comprehensive training resources ensure your team quickly becomes productive with Zenduty:

• Role-specific training modules
• Interactive product tours
• Best practice documentation
• Regular office hours with Zenduty experts

Most organizations complete their migration within 2-4 weeks, with immediate cost savings and productivity benefits.

Conclusion

While PagerDuty deserves a big credit for pioneering the incident management space, their pricing model has evolved in a direction that prioritizes revenue extraction over customer value. As teams face the reality of managing more incidents with constrained budgets, alternatives like Zenduty offer a refreshing approach for comprehensive functionality, transparent pricing, and built-in AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

The question is no longer whether PagerDuty's solution works, it's whether the premium price tag is justified when equally capable alternatives exist at much lower costs. For most organizations in 2025, the answer is increasingly clear and the future of incident management lies in platforms that deliver both technical excellence and financial sustainability.

Ready to experience the difference? Start a free trial of Zenduty today and discover how modern incident management can be both powerful and cost-effective.

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