Cheapest On-call & incidents tools
Answer: Among 4 verified On-call & incidents vendors with a free plan in our dataset (checked through 2026-10-30), our evidence-based free pick is PagerDuty: 5 users; 1 on-call schedule & escalation policy; limited notifications. Paid entry for PagerDuty is stated as $21/user/mo (annual; $25 monthly). We rank by stated free-plan limits, not invented unit costs.
- Verified free plans in category: 4
- Free pick: PagerDuty — 5 users; 1 on-call schedule & escalation policy; limited notifications
- Pick paid from: $21/user/mo (annual; $25 monthly)
- Last verified (pick): 2026-10-24
PagerDuty’s free plan covers 5 users with one schedule and escalation policy — enough for a tiny team’s rotation. incident.io’s free plan is the better choice if you live in Slack/Teams and need a status page too. Rootly lists no free tier.
Based only on plan limits recorded from vendor pages.
All verified free plans in On-call & incidents
| Vendor | Free limits | Paid from | Checked | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FireHydrant | Up to 10 responders; 2 runbooks; Slack & Teams chatbot | $25/responder/mo billed annually | 2026-10-24 | source |
| ilert | Up to 5 users; on-call management; 1 status page; 100 SMS/voice notifications | $49/user/mo (billed annually, "starts from") | 2026-10-24 | source |
| incident.io | Slack/Teams incident response; single-team on-call; status page | $15/user/mo (annual; $19 monthly) | 2026-10-24 | source |
| PagerDuty free pick | 5 users; 1 on-call schedule & escalation policy; limited notifications | $21/user/mo (annual; $25 monthly) | 2026-10-24 | source |
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Data: Cheapest On-call & incidents free tiers as of 2026-10-30. Source: O11y Watch (https://o11y-watch.pages.dev). License: CC BY 4.0. Please attribute "O11y Watch" with a link to https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/.