PagerDuty Free pricing breakdown

• The base tier is free at $0/mo, which includes 5 user seats for your core engineering team.
• You are limited to 100 incidents per month under the entry-level plan, beyond which automated alerting throttles or requires a forced upgrade to paid tiers.
• While the platform supports unlimited monitored targets, the constraints on incident volume and personnel access make this plan strictly a proof-of-concept tool for small teams.
• The provider does not charge for egress or storage in the traditional sense, as the value is tied to notification delivery and on-call rotation management rather than raw compute or NVMe disk capacity.

PagerDuty operates as a specialized orchestration layer that sits atop your existing infrastructure. Unlike managing raw virtual machines on AMD EPYC silicon or deploying ARM-based instances on competing platforms like Hetzner or Linode, you are paying for the reliability of the notification pipeline. The 100 incident limit is the primary bottleneck for scaling. If your infrastructure triggers frequent false positives or lacks proper noise reduction—such as intelligent grouping of alerts via Prometheus or Datadog—you will hit this ceiling quickly. Moving past these limits forces a jump into higher-tier per-user pricing, which can significantly inflate the monthly budget for teams that grow beyond the initial 5 seats.

This plan is effective for early-stage startups or individual developers who need to manage basic uptime monitoring without incurring upfront costs. It provides enough headroom for low-noise environments where critical service failures are rare. Once your team size increases or your microservices architecture generates a high volume of distributed alerts, the per-incident and per-user costs become a standard line item that requires active monitoring to prevent budget creep.