PagerDuty pricing and cost per user: every plan, add-on rate and the free plan cliff
PagerDuty bills per person and sells the rest as add-ons, so the sticker price rarely matches the invoice. Put your headcount in and the calculator prices all three published plans at once, including the jump off the free tier.
PagerDuty plan cost calculator
LivePlan and add-on rates read from pagerduty.com/pricing in September 2026, USD list. Two assumptions are flagged rather than hidden. The stakeholder and status page rates are printed as "Starting at" and "From", so they are floors and a real quote can be higher. And PagerDuty publishes its annual saving as a per-user rate only, so the annual setting discounts seats and leaves add-ons at their monthly rate. Enterprise carries no published figure and is not priced here.
How much does PagerDuty cost?
PagerDuty costs $0 for up to 5 users, $21 per user per month on Professional and $41 per user per month on Business when you pay annually, or $25 and $49 on monthly billing. Enterprise is quote-only. The number that catches teams out is not on the price list: the free plan holds 5 users, so the sixth person does not add $252 a year, it moves all six onto a paid plan and costs $1,512 in year one, exactly six times the advertised per-user price. The second thing to budget for is the add-on menu, because status pages, stakeholder licences and AIOps are all charged on top of the per-user fee, and a status page at $89 a month costs more than four Professional seats.
The short version
- Free
- $0, up to 5 users
- Professional
- $21 per user a month annually, $25 monthly
- Business
- $41 per user a month annually, $49 monthly
- The sixth user
- $1,512 in year one, not $252
Every PagerDuty plan and what it includes
Four tiers, of which three carry a number. Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing document in September 2026, and the per-user rates come from the machine-readable plan data embedded in that page rather than from the rendered cards.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Billed | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Up to 5 | 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy, 100 international phone and SMS notifications a month, 750+ integrations |
| Professional | $25 | $21 | Per user | Free plus Slack and Teams chat, more on-call schedules and escalation policies, major incident tooling, post-incident reviews |
| Business | $49 | $41 | Per user | Professional plus custom fields, up to 3 custom incident types, expanded incident workflows, advanced admin and ITSM |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Quote only | Business plus the full incident lifecycle. No figure is published, so it cannot be priced from the page |
Read from pagerduty.com/pricing in September 2026, USD. PagerDuty changes its price list, so re-check before you budget.
The sixth user costs $1,512, not $252
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding on the PagerDuty price list, and it is a consequence of the published limits rather than anything hidden. The free plan holds up to 5 users. Paid plans bill every user. So a team of five pays nothing, and the moment a sixth person needs a login, all six become billable at once.
| Team size | Plan | Per month | Per year | Cost of the last person added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Free | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 6 | Professional | $126 | $1,512 | $1,512, or 6 times the list price |
| 7 | Professional | $147 | $1,764 | $252 |
| 10 | Professional | $210 | $2,520 | $252 |
| 10 | Business | $410 | $4,920 | $492 |
Annual rates, so $21 and $41 per user per month. On monthly billing the step is larger still: six users at $25 is $1,800 for the year. The practical consequence is that the free plan is not a gentle on-ramp to a paid one. It is a cliff at a specific headcount, and the ratio is exact rather than approximate, because the first five seats stop being free at the same instant the sixth is created. If you are at four people and hiring, the honest question is not whether $21 a head is reasonable. It is whether you want a monitoring and alerting bill that steps by four figures on a hiring decision.
The annual discount is real, and it is not the same on both tiers
Credit where it is due. PagerDuty prints "Save $48/user annually" on Professional and "Save $96/user annually" on Business, and both claims survive checking. Twelve months of Professional at the monthly price is $300 against $252 at the annual rate, which is exactly the $48 promised. Business is $588 against $492, exactly $96. Several vendors in this category advertise a saving that does not match their own arithmetic, so it is worth saying plainly that this one does.
| Plan | 12 months at monthly | 12 months at annual | Saving | Real discount | Months charged |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Professional | $300 | $252 | $48 | 16.00% | 10.08 |
| Business | $588 | $492 | $96 | 16.33% | 10.04 |
The two discounts look identical in the way they are presented and are not identical in size: 16.00 percent against 16.33 percent. It is a third of a percentage point, so nobody should switch tiers over it, but it does mean the usual shorthand for this pricing shape is wrong here. This is not "two months free". You are charged for 10.08 months on Professional and 10.04 on Business, so the annual commitment buys you slightly less than two free months in both cases.
The add-on menu, which is where the invoice actually grows
Professional and Business both list five available add-ons, and every one of them is charged on top of the per-user fee. Two carry a clean unit rate, one carries a floor and a consumption meter, and two carry no published figure at all. Where PagerDuty does not publish a number, this table says so rather than inventing one.
| Add-on | Published rate | Per unit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status Pages | $89 per 1,000 subscribers a month | $0.089 per subscriber a month | Printed as "From". Costs more per month than four Professional seats |
| Premium Status Pages | From $599 per 1,000 subscribers a month | $0.599 per subscriber a month | 6.73 times the standard page. Buys private and audience-specific access, nothing else |
| Stakeholder Licence | From $150 per 50 stakeholders a month | $3.00 per stakeholder a month | Read-only business visibility. Flat across tiers, so the ratio to a responder changes |
| AIOps | From $799 a month, $699 on annual billing | Consumption-based above the floor | Noise reduction and event intelligence. Cannot be fully priced from the page |
| Live Call Routing | No figure published | Not published | Listed as an available add-on on Professional and Business |
| PagerDuty Advance | Token-based, no list price | Per Action token | AI actions. The page says token costs are visible only inside your own subscription |
Two ratios fall out of this table that are worth carrying into a negotiation. A read-only stakeholder costs $3.00 a month and a responder costs $21 or $41, so the same human being is 7 times more expensive on Professional and 13.7 times on Business depending only on whether they can act on an incident. And because the $3.00 stakeholder rate is flat across tiers while the responder rate is not, upgrading from Professional to Business nearly doubles that ratio without changing what the stakeholder gets. Fifty stakeholders at $150 a month cost less than four Business responders at $164.
A status page costs more than four Professional seats
PagerDuty sells status pages as an add-on, from $89 a month per 1,000 subscribers, with a Premium tier from $599. At $89 that page costs more each month than four Professional seats at $84, which is not how most teams think about it when they add it to a quote. The more useful finding is what the extra $510 a month actually buys. We read all fourteen rows of the vendor's own comparison, and the two products differ on exactly three.
| Feature | Status Pages, from $89 | Premium, from $599 |
|---|---|---|
| Public status pages | Included | Included |
| Private status pages with SSO | Not included | Included |
| Audience specific status pages | Not included | Included |
| Both public and private subscribers | Not included | Included |
| Import subscribers | Included | Included |
| Automated incident updates | Included | Included |
| Customizable layouts | Included | Included |
| Human in the loop automation | Included | Included |
| Email, Slack and webhook subscriptions | Included | Included |
| Incident postmortems | Included | Included |
| Scheduled maintenance | Included | Included |
| Templates | Included | Included |
| Service uptime | Included | Included |
| Easy configuration | Included | Included |
Eleven of the fourteen rows are identical. Layouts, templates, postmortems, scheduled maintenance, service uptime metrics, subscriber import, automated updates and Slack subscriptions all ship on the cheaper product. The three that differ are private pages with SSO, audience-specific pages, and support for public and private subscribers together, which are three ways of describing the same capability: showing different status to different audiences. So the honest way to read the Premium tier is as an access-control product priced at $6,120 a year, not as a better status page. If you only need one public page, the extra buys you nothing. Our census of 40 live status pages found only 12 of them publish any uptime history at all, which suggests most teams are not using even the features the cheaper tier already includes.
PagerDuty does not check whether your site is up
This is not a criticism, it is the product boundary, and missing it is the most common budgeting mistake we see. PagerDuty is an incident response platform. It receives an event, decides who is on call, escalates if nobody acknowledges, and keeps a record of what happened. It does not run the check that discovers your site is down. That is what its 750+ monitoring and chat integrations exist to connect to.
So the real cost of finding out that your checkout is broken is two subscriptions, not one. A ten person team on Professional pays $2,520 a year for the routing, then pays again for whatever performs the checking, and again if they want a status page to tell customers. Priced honestly, that is $2,520 plus a monitor plus $1,068 for a thousand status page subscribers.
| Job to be done | PagerDuty | Uptimehub |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the check that detects downtime | No, integrates with a monitor | Yes, from 6 regions |
| On-call rotas and escalation policies | Yes, the core product | Alert routing, not full rota tooling |
| Branded status page | Add-on, from $89 a month | In every plan |
| Priced by | Per user | Per monitor, never per seat |
| Cost for 10 people watching 45 services | $210 a month, plus a monitor | $29 a month on Pro |
| Post-incident reviews, ITSM, AIOps | Yes, this is where it earns its price | No |
Read that table honestly and it splits buyers cleanly. If you run a real on-call operation, with rotations across squads, escalation that has to work at 3am, postmortems and a ticketing integration, PagerDuty is the mature product and nothing here replaces it. If what you actually need is to know quickly when a site, API, certificate or cron job breaks, to tell the right people, and to show customers a status page while you fix it, then a per-user incident platform is an expensive way to buy an alert. That job is $29 a month on our Pro plan with unlimited people on the account, because we price per monitor and never per seat. The wider pattern is in our breakdown of what monitoring seats cost at ten vendors, where the same ten person team ranges from $39 to $365 a month.
Which PagerDuty plan is right, and when it stops being
Free, up to 5 users
Genuinely useful, and not a trial. One on-call schedule, one escalation policy, 100 international phone and SMS notifications a month and the full integration library. It stops working the day you hire a sixth person who needs a login, and that day costs $1,512.
Professional, $21 per user
The default for a team that has outgrown one rota. Adds Slack and Teams, more schedules and escalation policies, major incident tooling and post-incident reviews. Watch the add-ons: a status page here costs more than four of these seats.
Business, $41 per user
Worth it for custom fields, custom incident types, expanded workflows and advanced ITSM. It doubles your per-person cost, so it earns its place on process depth rather than headcount. If you are buying it for one feature, price 50 stakeholder licences against it first.
One pattern worth naming, because it applies to every per-seat tool and not just this one. Monitor counts grow by deliberate decision, with a ticket attached and somebody thinking about cost. Headcount grows through five second access requests made by people who never see the invoice. That asymmetry is why per-seat bills surprise teams at renewal and per-monitor bills usually do not, and it is the reason we priced our own product the other way round. The same effect shows up across the category in our uptime monitoring pricing comparison, where billing model predicts the final bill better than the sticker price does.
PagerDuty pricing questions people actually ask
How much does PagerDuty cost?
PagerDuty costs $0 for up to 5 users, $21 per user per month on Professional and $41 per user per month on Business when billed annually. On monthly billing those become $25 and $49. Enterprise is quote-only with no published figure. A ten person team on Professional therefore pays $210 a month, or $2,520 a year, before any add-on.
Is PagerDuty free?
There is a genuine free plan, and it is not a trial. It covers up to 5 users with one on-call schedule, one escalation policy, 100 international phone and SMS notifications a month and the full 750+ integration library. For a small team that just needs a rota and a phone call at 3am, it is a real product. The limit that bites is the user count rather than the feature list.
What happens when you go over 5 users on PagerDuty?
The whole team moves onto a paid plan, not just the extra person. Five users cost nothing and six users cost 6 times $21 a month on annual billing, which is $1,512 for the first year. So the sixth person carries a marginal cost of $1,512, exactly six times the $252 that the per-user price implies. Teams that hire past five in a quarter should budget for the step rather than the seat.
How much do you save with PagerDuty annual billing?
Professional saves $48 per user per year and Business saves $96, and both figures reconcile exactly against the monthly prices. The two are not the same discount though. $48 on $300 is 16.00 percent while $96 on $588 is 16.33 percent, so Business gets the slightly better deal. Neither is two months free: you are charged for about 10.08 months on Professional.
How much does a PagerDuty status page cost?
From $89 a month per 1,000 subscribers for the standard product, and from $599 a month per 1,000 for Premium. It is an add-on on Professional and Business rather than something bundled with the seat. At $89 a month a status page costs more than four Professional seats, which surprises teams who think of it as a small extra.
What is the difference between PagerDuty status pages and premium status pages?
Three things, and all three are about who can see the page. Premium adds private status pages with SSO, audience-specific pages, and support for both public and private subscribers. The other eleven features on the comparison, including layouts, templates, postmortems, scheduled maintenance, service uptime and Slack subscriptions, are identical on both. You pay $510 a month more for restricted access.
Does PagerDuty monitor your website?
No. PagerDuty receives alerts and routes them to the right person, but it does not check whether your site or API is up. That is what its 750+ monitoring and chat integrations are for. So a team buying PagerDuty to find out about downtime still needs a monitoring tool underneath it, and the true cost of knowing your site is down is both subscriptions added together.
How much is a PagerDuty stakeholder licence?
From $150 a month per 50 stakeholders, which works out at $3.00 per stakeholder per month. It gives executives and business stakeholders read-only visibility rather than the ability to respond. Because that $3.00 is flat while responder seats change with tier, a responder costs 7 times a stakeholder on Professional and 13.7 times on Business.
Does PagerDuty charge different prices in different countries?
It does not appear to. There is no currency switcher, no region-to-currency map and no euro or pound symbol anywhere in the pricing document, so the same USD figures are served everywhere. That is worth verifying on rivals, because Uptrends, UptimeRobot and Site24x7 all serve country-specific price lists and a figure quoted in a European review of those tools is not what a US buyer pays.
Is PagerDuty worth it for a small team?
It depends on whether you need incident response or just an alert. If you run a real on-call rota with escalation across squads, postmortems and ITSM integration, PagerDuty is the mature product in the category and the free plan takes a team of five a long way. If what you actually need is to know when a site, API or certificate breaks and to tell your customers, an uptime monitor with a built-in status page does that job in one subscription and does not bill per person.
Hiring someone should not change your monitoring bill
We price per monitor and never per seat, so the whole team and every client can have a login without moving the invoice. Checks run from six regions with auto-retry, and a branded status page is in every plan rather than an $89 add-on.
More monitoring price lists, taken apart the same way
Hyperping pricing
The one vendor whose seat price rises as you climb, so Pro is never the cheaper plan for people at any team size.
Better Stack pricing
No plans at all, just a free base and twenty add-ons, with a responder seat at $34 a month on top.
Pulsetic pricing
The only vendor that splits the seat, $8 for a login against $2 for a notify-only seat, which cuts a ten person rota by 58 percent.
Monitoring cost per user
Ten vendors and what each extra login costs, from $0 to $41 a month. The meter that decides most bills at year two.
Status page pricing
What a public status page costs across the market, and why subscriber counts drive the bill more than features do.
Uptime monitoring pricing compared
Every major vendor in one table, sorted by billing model, because the model decides the bill more than the sticker does.