PagerDuty on-call alternative
Replace PagerDuty’s pager.
Keep your incident process
Keep your monitoring, chat, runbooks, and postmortems. Acked handles on-call schedules, notifications, escalations, and the alert timeline, without per-seat pricing.
Start free with 1 schedule. Unlimited users on every plan.
If PagerDuty is your pager, Acked is the alternative
For teams that use PagerDuty to route alerts to the right on-call engineer, notify them, and escalate until someone responds, Acked provides that focused workflow without per-seat pricing.
- Know who is on call: rotations and temporary overrides.
- Get an answer: push or email notifications, optional voice, and escalation when nobody acknowledges.
- See what happened: a timeline from alert delivery through acknowledgement and resolution.
Keep the tools you already use to detect and resolve incidents. Acked fits between your monitoring and your response process.
Switch the pager, not your alert payloads
Set up your service, responders, schedule, and escalation path in Acked. If your alert sender uses PagerDuty Events API v2 and lets you change its destination, point it to Acked with a new routing key. Keep the event payload unchanged.
Endpointhttps://api.acked.dev/v2/enqueue
Routing key
Create a PagerDuty Events API v2 source on your Acked service and use the key it provides.
Acked supports trigger, acknowledge, and resolve, and preserves your case-sensitive dedup_key. See Events API v2 setup.
Test one service alongside PagerDuty if your sender supports a second destination. Confirm the schedule, device notifications, escalation, and acknowledgement path before switching that service to Acked. Keep the previous destination settings for rollback.
Pricing and limits
Flat plans with unlimited responders
Every plan includes unlimited users and alerts, plus standard integrations. Schedule limits and history retention depend on your plan.
Free
$0
No subscription charge
- 1 schedule
- 14-day history
- Push and email
- Voice unavailable
Starter
$9 / month
Or $90 billed annually
- 3 schedules
- 90-day history
- Push and email
- Voice unavailable
Team
$49 / month
Or $490 billed annually
- Unlimited schedules
- 1-year history
- Push and email
- Voice billed separately
Business
Contact us
Terms agreed with your team
- Unlimited schedules
- Custom retention
- Everything in Team
- Procurement and contracts
Voice paging is available on Team and Business and billed separately based on destination and duration.
Unlimited alerts describes billing. Ingest rate limits and alert-storm protections still apply. New paid subscriptions default to annual billing. Choose monthly if that fits your evaluation. See billing details.
Questions before you move the pager
What if we use PagerDuty for more than paging?
If your team relies on PagerDuty’s broader incident-management features, check those requirements before switching.
How can we check that alerts reach our responders?
Send test alerts to the devices and email addresses your team will use. The timeline records delivery attempts and acknowledgements. A sent push result means the provider accepted the notification. It does not prove that the phone displayed it or made a sound.
Enable notification permissions, iPhone Critical Alerts, and the relevant Android Do Not Disturb settings. Test while the phone is locked and with your usual Focus or battery settings. The operating system controls the final display and sound. See device readiness checks.
Can we recreate our on-call schedules?
Acked supports rotation layers, timezones, handoff intervals, and temporary overrides. Recreate a representative rotation and verify its current responder and next handoff. Check complex coverage requirements against the schedule documentation before moving every team.
What happens if nobody acknowledges?
Acked advances through the configured escalation levels and waits. You can configure a limited number of passes through the chain. When those passes end without acknowledgement, the alert is marked unreachable and remains open for someone to handle. Check the escalation path as part of your parallel test.
Which integrations can we keep?
Acked accepts PagerDuty Events API v2, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus Alertmanager, and native HTTP alert payloads. Outbound webhooks send alert lifecycle events to other systems. Check your sender’s endpoint settings and test both firing and recovery payloads. Support for an event format does not imply support for every PagerDuty feature. See sources and destinations.
Do we need a dedicated migration tool?
You can use Codex with both MCP servers to inspect your PagerDuty setup and create the supported configuration in Acked. Ask it to show the mapping and flag unsupported settings before it writes. Validate the resulting schedule and escalation path with parallel tests.
Events API v2 compatibility handles incoming events. Changing monitoring destinations requires access to those tools, and this workflow does not transfer historical incidents. Keep access to PagerDuty history you need.
Can we evaluate Acked without paying for voice?
Yes. Free includes one schedule with push and email. Starter adds room for three schedules. Voice requires Team or Business and incurs separate usage charges. It is not included in the subscription price.
Start with one rotation and one test alert
Create your Acked service, configure the paging path, and compare it with your current setup.
Get started