PagerDuty
The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying.
On-call management: rotas, escalation policies and alerts that keep trying — phone, SMS and push — until a human acknowledges them.
Build the rota. Buy the delivery. WHERE THE LINE IS - Waking a person at 3am is a delivery problem, and delivery must not run on your own infrastructure STACK - A tiny worker on a different provider entirely, SQLite, Twilio for voice and SMS THE ROTA - A schedule of who is on call, with overrides that take precedence - Computed at query time from rules, never a materialised calendar ESCALATION - Alert the primary; if no acknowledgement in five minutes, the secondary; then everyone - Acknowledgement by replying to the SMS or answering the call and pressing a key WHAT TO GET RIGHT - Deduplicate by incident key, or a flapping check calls someone forty times - A daily heartbeat proving the pager itself works. Nobody discovers a broken pager at a good moment Include the rota query, the escalation worker and the heartbeat.
What you lose
- Phone and SMS delivery that works when your own infrastructure is the thing that is down
- Escalation policies with rotas, overrides and handovers already modelled
- A track record of not failing during an incident, which is the only thing that matters here
If you would rather not build
- Twilio plus your own escalation worker
- A shared phone and a rota, for a team of three
The escape hatch
open source · no votes, no paid placement
Grafana OnCall
$0Open-source on-call scheduling and escalation, self-hostable.
grafana/oncallfree · open source
Uptime Kuma
$0Handles detection and notification; you would add the rota.
louislam/uptime-kumafree · open source
Why this verdict
our own opinion · changed only by a person
28/100
Verdict no at 28. The rota is a weekend; a paging system you can trust during your worst hour is not something to prove out on yourself.
History
tracked since 10 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten
Nothing recorded yet. This chart fills in once the page has visitors, votes or prompt copies — it will not draw a flat line to look busy.
Questions about PagerDuty
answered from the record above
Is PagerDuty free?
No — the plan we track is $21 a month. Professional at $21 per user per month billed monthly, cheaper annually.
Can you replace PagerDuty by building your own?
KEEP IT. The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying. Replacement score 28 out of 100, build time longer than it saves. Read what you lose before you decide.
How much does PagerDuty cost?
$21 a month on Professional — $252 a year. Recorded 10 Aug 2026.
What do you lose by replacing PagerDuty?
Phone and SMS delivery that works when your own infrastructure is the thing that is down; Escalation policies with rotas, overrides and handovers already modelled; A track record of not failing during an incident, which is the only thing that matters here. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to PagerDuty?
Yes: Grafana OnCall, Uptime Kuma. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.
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