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Frequently asked questions

• Does PagerDuty monitor uptime?

  No. PagerDuty runs no uptime checks of its own: no HTTP, SSL, keyword, ping, port, TCP or domain monitoring appears anywhere in its pricing or docs. It ingests alerts from external monitoring tools through its Events API and 750+ integrations, and its own blog points readers to partner products for URL monitoring. Even heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs is a do-it-yourself pattern that requires the paid AIOps add-on. Pulsetic is the detection side in one tool, checking from 3 locations on the free plan, 5 on Solo and 15 on Team. Alerting is built in: by email or webhook on any plan, and by phone, SMS, WhatsApp or Slack on Solo at $9.

• How much does PagerDuty actually cost?

  Professional is $21 per user per month billed annually ($25 monthly) and Business is $41 ($49 monthly). A 5-person on-call team starts at $105 per month, or $205 on Business if it needs the higher status-page caps or stakeholder users. The add-ons are where budgets go sideways: AIOps alert-noise reduction starts at $699 per month, the Advance AI assistant has been quoted at $415 per month, and stakeholder licenses and extra status page capacity are contact-sales items. Pulsetic is $9 to $49 per month flat, monitoring included.

• Is PagerDuty's free plan enough for a small team?

  It covers up to 5 users but is capped at 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy and 100 SMS or phone notifications per month, with no SSO and no status pages of any kind. Real rotations outgrow it quickly; it works best as an on-ramp to the per-user tiers. Pulsetic's free plan approaches it from the monitoring side: 10 monitors, status pages and custom domains, free for commercial use.

• What are PagerDuty's status pages like?

  Tier-gated and capacity-capped. The free plan has none; Professional includes one public page with up to 250 subscribers; private pages start at the Business tier, sold as a premium status-page package, and subscribers rise to 500; Enterprise reaches 1,000, with more capacity sold separately. Pages support a custom domain, logo and color palette, but custom CSS, layout control, branding removal, badges and translations are not documented, and posting is rate-limited. Pulsetic includes customizable status pages with subscriber notifications on every paid plan, starting at $9 per month. Translating a page's labels and dates is included on every plan, the free one too.

• Is PagerDuty overkill for a small team?

  Reviewers rate it highly, around 4.5 out of 5 on G2 from more than 900 reviews, and its alert delivery is famously dependable. But the top complaint on every channel is price, the second is complexity, and comparison write-ups commonly put the cutoff around 15 engineers: below that, per-user incident-management rates buy features most teams never touch. If your actual need is to know when your website goes down, alert the right person and show customers a status page, a monitoring-first tool covers it for a flat price.

• Can Pulsetic and PagerDuty work together?

  Yes. PagerDuty is built to receive alerts from monitoring tools, and Pulsetic can send webhook alerts as soon as a second location confirms a failed check, so Pulsetic can act as the detection layer that triggers PagerDuty's escalation machinery. Plenty of teams run exactly that pair, and plenty more find that Pulsetic's own phone, SMS, WhatsApp and chat alerting, all on the $9 Solo plan, covers them without a second subscription.

• What does PagerDuty have that Pulsetic does not?

  Deep incident orchestration: complex escalation policies, multi-team schedules, stakeholder communications, postmortems, event automation and enterprise compliance, plus an official MCP server, Terraform provider and a huge integration directory. If you are running incident command across hundreds of services and responders, that machinery earns its price. Pulsetic deliberately solves a smaller, more common problem: detect downtime, alert fast, keep customers informed, at a price a small team does not have to justify.

• When should I switch from PagerDuty to Pulsetic?

  The usual triggers: the renewal quote climbed again; you are paying per user for a tool most of the team barely opens; you still had to buy separate monitoring because PagerDuty detects nothing on its own; or the status page you need sits a tier above your budget. Pulsetic folds detection, phone and SMS alerts and a customizable status page into flat plans from $9, and your PagerDuty webhooks can stay wired up during the transition.