PagerDuty Pricing 2026: Plans, Free Tier and Real Cost by Team Size
What PagerDuty costs in 2026: the Free and Professional plans, the PD Reliability Platform tiers, what Automation, Status Pages, AIOps and Live Call Routing cost, and the real monthly bill for teams of 5 to 50 engineers.
Short answer: in 2026 PagerDuty's incident management product has a Free plan for up to 5 users and a Professional plan at $21 per user per month billed annually ($25 billed monthly). Above that, PagerDuty sells the PD Reliability Platform as yearly platform fees: Starter at $2,800/year for 10 seats (5 plus 5 bonus seats for a limited time), Essential at $12,000/year for 25 seats, Plus at $48,000/year for 50 seats, and a custom-priced Ultimate tier.
The headline numbers are only part of the bill. Add-ons such as AIOps, status pages, Runbook Automation and Live Call Routing are sold separately on Professional, and every engineer you add to the rotation adds another seat. This guide walks through each plan, what it leaves out, and what a real team pays.
Prices checked against pagerduty.com/pricing on 11 November 2026, which lists Reliability Platform amounts as of 3 November 2026. PagerDuty changes its packaging often, so confirm before you sign.
PagerDuty Pricing Plans at a Glance
| Plan | Price | Seats | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 5 users | Trying PagerDuty with one schedule |
| Professional | $21/user/month annual, $25/user/month monthly | Per user | Small and mid-size teams that need paging |
| PD Reliability Platform: Starter | $2,800/year | 5 + 5 bonus seats, 30-seat cap | Teams that want AI and automation bundled |
| PD Reliability Platform: Essential | $12,000/year | 25 seats | Growing SRE functions |
| PD Reliability Platform: Plus | $48,000/year | 50 seats | Larger engineering orgs |
| PD Reliability Platform: Ultimate | Custom | 500 seats | Enterprise contracts |
The older Starter ($19), Business ($41) and Digital Operations per-user plans that most comparison articles still quote have been replaced by this lineup.
Is PagerDuty Free?
Yes, but only for very small setups. The Free plan allows up to 5 users, 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy, basic chat integration and a limited number of SMS and phone notifications (100 per month). That is enough to try the product or to page a single founding team. As soon as you need a second rotation (for example a backend and a frontend schedule), or a sixth engineer joins the rota, you are on a paid plan.
PagerDuty Professional Plan ($21/user/month)
Professional is the plan most teams mean when they say "PagerDuty pricing". It removes the Free plan's limits and adds:
- Unlimited on-call schedules and escalation policies
- Enhanced chat integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Post-incident reviews
- Phone, SMS, push and email notifications
- The full integration library for monitoring tools
What it does not include: AIOps (alert grouping and noise reduction), PagerDuty Advance (the generative AI features), Runbook Automation, Status Pages and Live Call Routing. PagerDuty lists these as add-ons "purchased separately" and does not publish prices, so you get them through a sales conversation.
PD Reliability Platform Pricing
The PD Reliability Platform tiers are priced as an annual platform fee with a fixed number of seats, events and AI actions included, rather than a per-user rate:
| Tier | Annual fee | Seats | Events | AI actions | Effective cost per seat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $2,800 | 10 (5 + 5 bonus, limited time; 30-seat cap) | 5,000 | 1,000 | ~$23/seat/month |
| Essential | $12,000 | 25 | 25,000 | 5,000 | $40/seat/month |
| Plus | $48,000 | 50 | 150,000 | 16,000 | $80/seat/month |
| Ultimate | Custom | 500 | 1,500,000 | 160,000 | Negotiated |
Seats include stakeholder licences, and PagerDuty bills them on the highest number of seats used in the previous month. On Starter, extra seats cost 40 credits each up to the 30-seat cap. Extra events, AI actions and Live Call Routing lines are bought as credit packs, again without public prices. PagerDuty notes that plans bought before 3 November 2026 may have different amounts.
PagerDuty Pricing by Product: Automation, Status Pages, AIOps and More
PagerDuty sells several products beyond incident management. Most of them have no public price on Professional, which is why searches for "PagerDuty automation pricing" or "PagerDuty status pages pricing" rarely find a number. Here is what the pricing page does and does not tell you:
| Product | On Professional | On PD Reliability Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Incident Management | $21/user/month annual, $25 monthly | Included |
| Status Pages | External status page with up to 250 subscribers; more (including private pages) is the Status Pages add-on, price on request | Internal and external status pages included |
| Automation (Runbook Automation) | Add-on, price on request | Add-on, price on request |
| AIOps (noise reduction) | Add-on, price on request | Signal Intelligence events included: 5,000 to 1,500,000 a year by tier |
| PagerDuty Advance (generative AI) | Add-on, price on request | AI actions included: 1,000 to 160,000 a year by tier |
| Live Call Routing | Add-on, price on request | 1 line on Starter, 2 on Essential, 3 on Plus and Ultimate |
Process Automation and Customer Service Operations do not appear on the pricing page at all, so they are quote-only. In practice, if you need status pages or AIOps, compare Professional plus add-ons against the Starter or Essential platform fee, since the platform tiers bundle them.
PagerDuty Cost by Team Size
Here is what the published prices work out to for common team sizes on Professional, billed annually, before any add-ons:
| Engineers on call | Professional (annual) | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | $105/month | $1,260 |
| 10 | $210/month | $2,520 |
| 15 | $315/month | $3,780 |
| 30 | $630/month | $7,560 |
| 50 | $1,050/month | $12,600 |
On monthly billing, multiply by $25 instead of $21. Add AIOps, Runbook Automation or more than a 250-subscriber status page and the total moves up from there.
Hidden Costs and Add-Ons
Per-seat growth
Every engineer you add to a rotation is another seat. Teams often keep the rota small to control the bill, which concentrates pager load on fewer people and makes burnout more likely.
Add-ons without public prices
AIOps, PagerDuty Advance, Runbook Automation, Status Pages beyond the 250-subscriber external page, and Live Call Routing all need a quote on Professional. Budget for at least one of them if alert noise is your main problem.
Stakeholder access
On Professional, people who only need to follow incidents still need access. The PD Reliability Platform tiers include stakeholders, which is one reason teams get pushed up to a platform tier.
Setup and maintenance time
Services, schedules, escalation policies and integrations all live in PagerDuty's web app. Someone has to own that configuration as the team changes, which is a cost even if it never shows on the invoice.
Is PagerDuty Worth the Cost?
PagerDuty is worth it if you:
- Run a large, multi-team on-call program with complex escalation chains
- Need event intelligence and AIOps to cut very high alert volume
- Have compliance requirements that PagerDuty's audit trail already satisfies
- Already have an enterprise agreement that bundles it at a discount
It is harder to justify for teams of 5 to 30 engineers who mostly need a fair rotation, reliable paging and a clear view of who is on call in Slack.
A Per-Team Alternative to PagerDuty's Per-User Pricing
Pagerly prices by team instead of by user. Rotations, schedule overrides and Slack user group sync start at $19 per team per month; the Starter plan at $39 per team adds status pages, uptime and vendor monitoring and two-way sync with PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Jira. On-call paging (phone call, SMS, email and app push with L1 to L2 to L3 escalation) is an add-on at $4 per responder per month, charged only for people who can actually be paged.
| 15 engineers on call | PagerDuty Professional | Pagerly Starter + paging |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $315 | $99 ($39 + 15 x $4) |
| Pricing model | Per user | Per team, paging per responder |
| Status pages | 250-subscriber external page; more is an add-on | Included |
| Where schedules are managed | PagerDuty web app | Slack (and the web dashboard) |
| People who only view the schedule | Need access | Free |
If you want to keep PagerDuty for paging and only fix the Slack side, Pagerly can also sync PagerDuty schedules to Slack user groups. For a full feature comparison, see Pagerly vs PagerDuty.
PagerDuty Pricing FAQ
How much does PagerDuty cost per user?
$21 per user per month on the Professional plan billed annually, or $25 per user per month billed monthly.
Does PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes. The Free plan supports up to 5 users with one on-call schedule, one escalation policy and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month.
What happened to the PagerDuty Business plan?
The per-user Business ($41) and Digital Operations plans are no longer on PagerDuty's pricing page. Teams that need more than Professional now buy a PD Reliability Platform tier priced as an annual platform fee.
How much is PagerDuty enterprise pricing?
The Ultimate tier is custom priced. The largest published tier, Plus, is $48,000 a year for 50 seats.
Are PagerDuty stakeholder licenses included?
On the PD Reliability Platform tiers, seats include stakeholder licences. On Professional, extra stakeholder access is part of the add-on conversation with sales.
How much does PagerDuty automation cost?
Runbook Automation is an add-on on every paid plan, and PagerDuty does not publish its price, so you need a quote from sales. Process Automation is not on the pricing page either.
Does PagerDuty charge for status pages?
Professional includes an external status page with up to 250 subscribers. Private status pages and larger audiences need the Status Pages add-on or a PD Reliability Platform tier, which includes internal and external status pages.
What is the cheapest alternative to PagerDuty?
For small and mid-size teams, a per-team tool is usually cheapest. Pagerly starts at $19 per team per month, with paging at $4 per responder.
Paying for seats that only need to see the schedule? Pagerly bills per team, runs your rotation inside Slack and pages only the people on call. Get started free