PagerDuty Pricing in 2026: What It Really Costs Your Team

PagerDuty is the default choice for incident management. It has been around since 2009, it integrates with everything, and most engineering teams have used it at some point. None of that is in question.

What is in question is what you're actually paying for it, especially as your team grows. Per-user pricing sounds reasonable when you're three engineers sharing an on-call rotation. It starts to look very different when you have 20 people who need access.

Here's a full breakdown of PagerDuty's pricing tiers, what real teams end up paying, and where flat-rate alternatives fit in.

PagerDuty's Pricing Tiers

PagerDuty offers four pricing tiers. Prices listed here are approximate as of February 2026 and may vary based on your contract and region. Please verify against PagerDuty's pricing page for the latest rates.

Free is available for up to 5 users. You get basic on-call scheduling, alerting, and a limited number of integrations. It works for very small teams or for evaluating the product, but it's missing things like escalation policies with more than one level, stakeholder notifications, and advanced analytics.

Professional costs around $21 per user per month. This is where most small-to-mid teams start. You get unlimited escalation policies, more integrations, and features like response mobilization. It covers the core incident management workflow.

Business runs about $41 per user per month. This tier adds stakeholder communication tools, change events, service dependency mapping, and more granular analytics. It's aimed at teams that need visibility beyond the on-call rotation.

Digital Operations is custom-priced enterprise tier. It includes AIOps, event intelligence, and advanced workflow automation. You'll need to talk to sales.

All paid plans are billed annually by default, and monthly billing (where available) typically costs more.

What You Actually Pay

The per-user model means your bill scales linearly with headcount. Here's what that looks like at common team sizes.

These are the base costs. They don't include add-ons, and they assume annual billing. If you're paying monthly, expect to pay more.

At 20 users on the Business plan, you're spending nearly $10,000 a year on incident management alone. At 50 users, that's over $24,000 annually. For some teams, that's the cost of an additional engineer.

Hidden Costs to Watch For

The published per-user price isn't always the final number on your invoice. A few things tend to increase the bill beyond what you planned for.

Add-on features like AIOps and advanced analytics are sold separately on lower tiers. If you need event intelligence or automated triage on the Professional plan, you'll pay extra for those capabilities.

Annual commitments lock you into a user count. If you're growing quickly and add engineers mid-contract, you may owe additional fees. If you overestimate your headcount, you're paying for seats nobody uses.

Stakeholder licenses are a common gotcha. Your engineering managers, product managers, and executives might want visibility into incidents without being on-call. On some plans, each of those viewers needs a paid seat. On others, stakeholder-specific licenses exist but add to your total cost.

Overage and integration limits can also come into play depending on your tier and usage patterns. If you're running a high volume of alerts through many integrations, check whether your plan has any caps.

The Per-User Problem

Here's the thing most pricing pages don't address: per-user pricing creates a perverse incentive in incident management specifically.

When every new user adds $21 to $41 to your monthly bill, teams start rationing access. The engineering manager who should see incidents in real time doesn't get a seat. The junior engineer who's about to join the on-call rotation doesn't get added until they're actually scheduled. The platform team that needs cross-service visibility shares a single account.

This directly undermines what incident management tools are supposed to do. The whole point is getting the right information to the right people as fast as possible. When you're optimizing for fewer seats instead of better coverage, you've got a structural problem.

It's not that PagerDuty designed it this way on purpose. Per-user pricing is standard in SaaS. But incident management is one of those categories where restricting access to save money has real operational consequences. A missed escalation or a delayed response because someone didn't have access is a much more expensive problem than a few extra seats.

Flat-Rate Alternative: How NearIRM Pricing Works

NearIRM takes a different approach. The price is $29 per month, or $290 per year if you pay annually. That's for unlimited users with all features included.

There's no per-user calculation. No seat management. No stakeholder license add-ons. Everyone on your team who needs access gets access.

Here's how that compares at different team sizes:

At 10 users on PagerDuty Professional, you're paying $210 per month. With NearIRM, it's $29. That's an 86% reduction. On the Business tier, the gap is even wider.

The cost stays flat regardless of how many people you add. Your intern joining the on-call rotation for a month? No extra charge. Your VP of Engineering wanting incident dashboards? Already included. Your entire platform team getting cross-service alert visibility? Same price.

NearIRM covers the core incident management workflow: multi-channel alerting, escalation policies, on-call scheduling, and notification delivery. It handles the things most teams actually need from their incident management tool without charging per head for each one.

When PagerDuty Makes Sense

This isn't a "PagerDuty is bad" post. PagerDuty is a mature product with capabilities that justify its pricing for certain teams.

If you're a large enterprise with hundreds of services and you need AIOps to automatically correlate and suppress alerts across a complex microservices architecture, PagerDuty's event intelligence is genuinely useful. That kind of ML-driven noise reduction is hard to build and hard to find elsewhere.

If you need deep integrations with enterprise ITSM tools like ServiceNow, or you need advanced workflow automation that triggers remediation scripts automatically, PagerDuty's ecosystem is hard to match.

If your organization requires SOC 2 Type II compliance, FedRAMP authorization, or other enterprise security certifications as a prerequisite for procurement, PagerDuty checks those boxes.

For teams where the per-user cost is a rounding error in their cloud bill and the advanced features provide measurable value, PagerDuty is a reasonable choice.

When Flat-Rate Makes More Sense

For a lot of teams, though, the advanced stuff isn't what they need day-to-day. They need alerts to reach the right person, escalations to work when someone doesn't respond, and schedules to rotate without manual intervention.

Teams under 50 people feel the per-user cost most acutely. At this size, your incident management tool is a significant line item, and the enterprise features you're paying for on higher tiers often go unused.

Startups and scale-ups are adding engineers constantly. With per-user pricing, every new hire increases your incident management cost. With flat-rate pricing, your tooling cost stays predictable as you grow.

Teams that need core alerting without extras benefit from a simpler tool that does the fundamentals well. If you're not using AIOps, event intelligence, or complex workflow automation, you're paying for features that sit idle.

Organizations where everyone should have access find flat-rate pricing removes the friction entirely. Engineering managers, SREs, developers, QA engineers, and stakeholders can all have accounts without anyone worrying about the budget impact.

Making the Switch

If you're evaluating your incident management costs, the comparison is straightforward. Add up what you're currently paying per month, including any add-ons or stakeholder licenses. Then compare that to $29.

For most teams under 50 people, the math speaks for itself. You get the same core capabilities (alerting, escalation, scheduling, multi-channel notifications) at a fraction of the cost, with no artificial limits on who can access the system.

Check out our detailed PagerDuty comparison for a feature-by-feature breakdown, or visit our pricing page to see exactly what's included. You can start a free trial without a credit card and have your team onboarded in minutes, not weeks.

Your incident management tool should help your whole team respond to incidents. Not just the people whose seats you can justify in the budget.