PagerDuty costs $21 per user per month on Professional when billed annually, or $25 billed monthly. The free plan covers up to 5 users and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month. The old Business plan is no longer listed: above Professional, PagerDuty now sells the PD Reliability Platform for an annual platform fee, starting at $2,800 a year for 10 seats. The number most buyers miss is that PagerDuty does not monitor anything: it has no checks, no probes and no synthetic tests, so the paging bill is only half the cost of being told your site is down.
That last point is the one worth settling before you compare tiers. PagerDuty is an incident response platform. It receives an event from something else, decides who is on call, escalates when that person does not acknowledge, and keeps a record of what happened. Every one of those jobs is valuable, and none of them detects an outage. If you are pricing PagerDuty because you want to be woken up when the site goes down, you are pricing one of two products you need.
The full PagerDuty pricing rate card for 2026
These are the list prices published on PagerDuty's own pricing page. PagerDuty now sells two ladders: per-user Incident Management plans for small teams, and the PD Reliability Platform, which is a flat annual platform fee with a set number of seats. All figures are US dollars.
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | Annual saving | Users or seats | SMS and phone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | None | Up to 5 users | 100 a month |
| Professional | $21 per user a month | $25 per user a month | $48 per user | Per user, no cap | Included |
| Reliability Platform Starter | $2,800 a year | Not offered | Not applicable | 10 seats | Included |
| Reliability Platform Essential | $12,000 a year | Not offered | Not applicable | 20 seats | Included |
| Reliability Platform Plus | $48,000 a year | Not offered | Not applicable | 40 seats | Included |
| Reliability Platform Ultimate | Custom, contact sales | Not published | 500 seats | Included | |
The annual discount on Professional is exactly 16%: $4 off a $25 seat, which is where PagerDuty's own "save $48 per user annually" claim comes from. It checks out. The platform tiers are paid up front for the year, and each one also includes a set number of Signal Intelligence Events (5,000 on Starter, 40,000 on Essential, 150,000 on Plus, 2,000,000 on Ultimate), AI actions and stakeholders. If you need more seats or events than your tier includes, PagerDuty sells credit packs, and it does not publish their price.
Per seat, the platform tiers work out to $23.33 a month on Starter ($2,800 over 10 seats and 12 months), $50 on Essential and $100 on Plus, but only if every included seat is used. The fee is the same whether you fill the seats or not.
The free tier ends at 5 users and the step is steep
PagerDuty's free plan is genuinely usable for one small team: email and push alerts, one on-call schedule, one escalation policy and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month, for up to five people. The moment you add a sixth, you have to move to a paid plan and every user is billed, including the five who were free the day before.
On Professional annual that sixth engineer takes you from $0 to $126 a month (6 users at $21), which is $1,512 a year. Billed monthly it is $150 a month, or $1,800 a year. The cheapest platform tier, Starter, would cost $2,800 a year for the same six people. This is the single largest step in PagerDuty's pricing and it lands on small teams at exactly the point where they start growing. If you are at four responders and hiring, budget for it now rather than discovering it in a renewal conversation.
What PagerDuty actually costs per year
Per-user-per-month numbers are hard to reason about at team scale. These are annualized list prices, before any add-ons, credit packs and negotiated discounts.
| Responders | Professional annual | Professional monthly billing | Smallest platform tier with enough seats | Platform fee per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $1,260 | $1,500 | Starter (10 seats) | $2,800 |
| 6 | $1,512 | $1,800 | Starter (10 seats) | $2,800 |
| 10 | $2,520 | $3,000 | Starter (10 seats) | $2,800 |
| 25 | $6,300 | $7,500 | Plus (40 seats) | $48,000 |
| 50 | $12,600 | $15,000 | Ultimate (500 seats) | Custom |
The platform column assumes you buy a tier whose included seats cover everyone. The alternative is a smaller tier plus credit packs: 25 people could be Essential at $12,000 for 20 seats plus credits for 5 more, and 50 people could be Plus at $48,000 for 40 seats plus credits for 10 more. PagerDuty does not publish credit pack prices, so those totals have to come from a quote.
The break-even is the useful number. Starter's $2,800 equals Professional annual at 11.1 users ($2,800 divided by $252 a user a year), but Starter only includes 10 seats. So on list price alone, Starter never undercuts Professional annual: at a full 10 seats it costs $280 a year more ($23.33 a month). Against Professional billed monthly the break-even is 9.3 users, so a 10-person team paying month to month ($3,000 a year) would spend $200 less on Starter. The real case for Starter is what comes with it: stakeholders counted inside the seats, one Live Call Routing line, 5,000 Signal Intelligence Events for alert grouping and noise reduction (which on Professional means buying AIOps), private status pages, round robin scheduling and audit trail reporting. If a 10-person Professional team would pay more than $280 a year for any of those add-ons, Starter is the cheaper bill.
The add-ons are where the quote grows
On Professional, PagerDuty sells five capabilities separately from the seat price: AIOps, PagerDuty Advance, Runbook Automation, Status Pages and Live Call Routing. It does not publish a price for any of them, so get your own quote in writing before you budget.
| Add-on | What it does | On Professional | On the Reliability Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status Pages | Public or private customer-facing status page | External page with 250 subscribers listed; more is an add-on, price not published | External and private status pages included |
| AIOps | Alert grouping, suppression and noise reduction | Add-on, price not published | Included as Signal Intelligence Events, 5,000 on Starter |
| PagerDuty Advance | Generative AI for incidents and post-incident reviews | Add-on, price not published | Included as AI actions |
| Live Call Routing | Phone number that routes an inbound call to on call | Add-on, price not published | 1 line on Starter, 2 on Essential, 3 on Plus and Ultimate |
| Runbook Automation | Runbook and process automation | Add-on, quoted | Quoted |
This is why the platform tiers exist. A ten-person team on Professional annual pays $2,520 a year in seats, and Starter is $2,800 for the same ten people with stakeholders, a Live Call Routing line, event intelligence and private status pages already inside the fee. Once the add-on quotes for a Professional account pass that $280 gap, the platform tier is the better buy.
PagerDuty does not detect anything, and that changes the total
This is the part the tier comparison hides. PagerDuty's product is the response, not the signal. It integrates with hundreds of sources and it needs at least one of them to be sending events, which means a monitoring tool, an APM, a log platform, or a script you maintain. Buying PagerDuty without a detection layer gives you an excellent on-call rotation that nothing ever triggers.
So the honest question is what the pair costs. A five-person team that wants both external availability checks and proper escalation is looking at PagerDuty Professional at $1,260 a year plus whatever the detection tool costs. If the detection tool already includes escalation and a monthly SMS allowance, the second line item may not be necessary at all at that team size. Our alerting and escalation is on the Team plan, and the wider question of which layer to measure is covered in our comparison of availability monitoring tools.
Where PagerDuty earns its price is at scale and complexity: dozens of services with different owners, follow-the-sun rotations, service dependency mapping so one database failure does not page nine teams, and event correlation across a dozen signal sources. None of that is replaceable by a monitoring tool's built-in notifications, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Routing the right work to the right owner is its own discipline, which is why the same problem shows up outside engineering too and gets solved by automatically routing each request to the right person rather than by a shared inbox.
Three worked bills
A four-person startup. Free plan, $0. Four responders is inside the cap, and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month covers a quiet service. The limits are one on-call schedule and one escalation policy, and the SMS allowance is for the account, not per user, so one noisy week can exhaust it. Cost for the year: nothing, until you hire.
A ten-person platform team. Professional annual, $2,520 a year (10 users at $21 a month). SMS and phone notifications, schedules and escalation policies are all included. If the team also wants a private status page, a Live Call Routing line or alert grouping, those are separately priced add-ons, and Starter at $2,800 a year includes all three for up to 10 seats. This is the most common shape and it is where PagerDuty is straightforwardly good value against building rotations by hand.
A fifty-person engineering org. Professional annual is $12,600 a year in seats alone (50 users at $21 a month), with AIOps and any other add-ons quoted on top. On the Reliability Platform, 50 people is more than the 40 seats in Plus at $48,000 a year, so it means Plus with credit packs or a custom Ultimate quote. At this point list price stops being the right number and you should be negotiating.
How PagerDuty billing works
On Professional, PagerDuty bills per user per month, and the user count is the whole bill for the base plan. You choose monthly or annual billing: $21 a user billed annually or $25 billed monthly. For a team of 10 that is $2,520 a year paid annually against $3,000 paid month to month, a $480 difference. The Reliability Platform works differently: a flat annual platform fee, paid up front, that covers a fixed number of seats whether you use them all or not.
Three things change the invoice after you sign up. Moving past 5 users means leaving the free plan, and every user is billed from then on. Add-ons such as AIOps, status pages, Live Call Routing and automation are priced separately from the Professional per-user rate, as covered above. And on the platform tiers, anything beyond the included seats and events is bought as credit packs, which are quoted. If you are staying on Professional for a year, pick the billing term first, because annual billing is a guaranteed 16% off.
Is PagerDuty worth it?
Below about six responders, usually not, because the free plan covers you and a monitoring tool with built-in escalation covers the rest. Between six and twenty, it depends entirely on whether you have more than one on-call rotation. Above twenty, or with more than a handful of services that have distinct owners, it is the category standard for a reason and the alternatives get thin quickly.
What it will not do, at any price, is tell you sooner. Detection speed is a property of your monitoring interval, not of your paging tool, so if your checks run every five minutes then PagerDuty receives the event five minutes late no matter which tier you bought. That trade is worked through in our guide to how often to check uptime, and the practical rotation side in on-call rotation best practices.
Does PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes. The free plan supports up to 5 users with email and push notifications, one on-call schedule and one escalation policy, plus 100 SMS or phone notifications a month across the whole account. It is a genuinely usable free tier for a single team, but it stops at one rotation, so a second schedule means paying even before you reach six people.
How much does PagerDuty cost per user?
$21 per user per month on Professional with annual billing, or $25 billed monthly. Every person who needs to be paged consumes a full license. On the Reliability Platform the price is per tier rather than per user: Starter is $2,800 a year for 10 seats, about $23.33 a seat a month if every seat is used, and those seats include stakeholder licenses.
What happened to the PagerDuty Business plan?
It is no longer on PagerDuty's pricing page. The per-user Incident Management plans now stop at Professional, and everything above it is the PD Reliability Platform: Starter at $2,800 a year for 10 seats, Essential at $12,000 for 20, Plus at $48,000 for 40 and Ultimate at a custom price for 500. Professional already includes SMS and phone notifications, schedules, escalation policies, service dependencies and single sign-on. Starter adds stakeholders inside the seats, round robin scheduling, audit trail reporting, private status pages, a Live Call Routing line and 5,000 Signal Intelligence Events, so the upgrade is about running a larger incident process rather than about getting alerts through.
Is PagerDuty cheaper than Opsgenie?
No, per user PagerDuty lists slightly higher: $21 a month on Professional against $19.95 for Opsgenie Standard, both billed annually. The comparison is mostly academic now. Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie to new customers on June 4, 2025 and shuts it off on April 5, 2027, so most teams pricing the two are Opsgenie customers pricing their way out. Our Opsgenie pricing and shutdown breakdown covers the full rate card and what the replacements cost. If your monitors already live in Datadog, its own paging product lists $20 a seat on an annual plan, and our Datadog On-Call pricing breakdown compares it seat for seat with PagerDuty and Splunk On-Call. For every PagerDuty alternative priced for 5 to 40 people, including incident.io and Better Stack, see the side-by-side yearly costs.