On PagerDuty’s per-user plans, the licence is a user subscription. The Terms of Service define a User as an authorized individual that the customer designates to use the Services under an Order Form and the applicable Documentation.[5] Unless the Order Form says otherwise, the Services may be accessed by no more than the specified number of Users, and each User must be identified by a unique email address and username.[5] PagerDuty’s documentation then divides users into Full Users and Stakeholder users, which are billed differently. This article explains the counting and billing rules that apply to those licences.
Plans and editions
PagerDuty’s pricing page presents Incident Management with a Free plan and a Professional plan. Free includes up to five users, one on-call schedule and one escalation policy, with 100 free global SMS or phone notifications per month; Professional is USD 21 per user per month on annual billing or USD 25 monthly, with add-ons AIOps, PagerDuty Advance, Runbook Automation, Status Pages and Live Call Routing.[6] The Customer Service Operations page lists Professional (USD 21 yearly or USD 25 monthly), Business (USD 41 yearly or USD 49 monthly) and Enterprise (on request) plans, each with a Stakeholder License as an available add-on.[7]
Documentation refers to additional plans that are not on the current pricing page. User role documentation distinguishes accounts on Free, Starter (legacy) and Team (legacy) plans, which have basic user roles, from accounts on Professional, Business, Digital Operations (legacy) and Enterprise for Incident Management plans, which use advanced permissions.[2] Single sign-on and some other features are available only on certain of these plans.[2] A licence manager should confirm the plan name on the Subscription Details card in the PagerDuty web application, which shows the current plan, the stakeholder seats included, the plan period and the renewal date.[1]
Full Users
A Full User is any user role other than Stakeholder or Limited Stakeholder.[1] The catalog row is Full User. On the Free plan the basic roles are Stakeholder, Limited User, User, Admin and Account Owner, and the Account Owner is the only role that can access billing information and cannot be deleted.[2] On the plans with advanced permissions, the base roles are Restricted Access, Observer, Responder and Manager (flexible roles), and Limited Stakeholder, Full Stakeholder, Global Admin and Account Owner (fixed roles).[3] Only the Account Owner can edit billing information and change pricing plans.[3]
Objects other than users do not affect billing. Schedules, services, integrations, extensions, add-ons and Teams have no effect on billing, and users can be added to any number of schedules, escalation policies or Teams at no additional cost.[1] A practitioner reconciling cost to the contract should therefore count people with a Full User role, not on-call schedules or services.
The high-water mark
For accounts on month-to-month plans, the monthly user charge is determined by the highest number of full users in the account at any time during the current month or prior months.[1] PagerDuty’s documentation spells out the consequence: the charge is based on that high-water mark and not on the number of users at present, so removing or deleting user accounts does not by itself lower the bill.[1] To reduce the billable count, the Account Owner submits a request with the desired number of licences, the number of active users must match the requested count, and the change applies to the following month’s invoice.[1] Account Owners can also set a Full User Limit, which defines the maximum number of users allowed on the account and prevents new invitations once reached.[1]
For annual plans the unit is the number of licences purchased. Accounts on an annual plan have a Full User limit and a Stakeholder limit based on licences purchased, and when the Full User count equals the purchased limit neither the Account Owner nor an Admin can add more users until the limit is raised.[4] Additional users bought during the term are co-termed to the annual plan with a prorated amount based on when the annual subscription completes.[1] The Terms of Service say the same in contractual form: added User subscriptions are coterminous and prorated to the end of the Subscription Term.[5] The Account Owner and, on accounts created from 2023, Global Admins can add user licences; on older accounts Global Admins need a request to PagerDuty Support to be given that ability.[1]
Reducing licences on an annual plan is a commercial matter rather than a console action. The Terms make each Order Form non-cancellable and non-refundable, and a notice of intent to downgrade or not renew is needed at least 30 days before the auto-renewal date.[5] Downgrading a pricing plan is done by contacting the Sales team, while upgrades can be completed in the web application.[1]
Stakeholder users
Stakeholder users have read-oriented access. The documentation states that Stakeholders can view objects in an account but cannot make modifications.[2] There are two kinds. A Full Stakeholder can view objects but cannot be assigned to or respond to incidents, and the intended use is as an incident subscriber who receives updates; a Limited Stakeholder can only view and subscribe to internal status pages and view and edit the user profile.[3] The catalog row is Stakeholder User.
Availability by plan matters because it determines whether stakeholders are paid for. Stakeholder users are available by default on Digital Operations (legacy) and Enterprise for Incident Management plans, and can be purchased as add-on users on Business and Professional plans.[2] Limited and Full Stakeholder subscriptions to internal status pages are only available on the Business, Digital Operations (legacy) and Enterprise for Incident Management plans.[3]
Stakeholder users are billed at a different rate from other users and are typically purchased in tiered bundles; for pricing the documentation refers the customer to Sales.[1] A Stakeholder bundle can be purchased in the web application under Subscriptions.[1] Moving a user between Stakeholder and Full User is a licence change, and the administrator sets the licence first and then picks the base role it offers, while moving between roles like Observer and Responder is only a base-role change.[4] This distinction affects counting. On the documented rules, a person moved from Responder to Stakeholder leaves the Full User role, but the billed count falls only through the licence-reduction request described above, and the high-water mark keeps the earlier peak in the current month.
Flexible Licensing and multiple products
The billing documentation describes Flexible Licensing as a way for account administrators to see which licences are assigned to each user and how many licence types have been deployed. It makes no change to existing assignments, moves licence management to the Users page and shows multiple base licences on the Your Subscription page where applicable.[1] Customers with several flexible-licence products, for example Incident Response and Customer Service Ops, manage and view licence data under Subscriptions.[1] A person holding a licence in more than one product therefore appears in more than one count, which a reconciliation needs to take into account.
Runbook Automation and other user-based products
Runbook Automation and Runbook Automation Self Hosted (previously Process Automation On-Prem) are purchased by the number of Users per month, and individuals who access the service through the customer’s own application login or API are counted as Users.[9] PD Labs licences are personal to the individual Labs User and may not be shared.[9]
Free plan and trials
The Terms provide a 14-day trial period, or other period as stated in the order, solely for evaluation, after which Hosted Services cease unless the customer buys a subscription or elects the Free Plan.[5] During the trial, users can be added and removed as needed, but users included in a paid subscription or the Free Plan can be changed only according to the plan elected.[5] PagerDuty may terminate use under the Free Plan for any reason or none and without prior notice.[5] The Free plan is limited to five users on the pricing page.[6]
Status pages
The Status Pages product offers internal, external and private pages.[8] The Professional plan on the pricing page includes external status pages with up to 250 subscribers, while the Platform tiers include them without that figure; Status Pages are also listed as a separate add-on for Professional.[6] The documentation describes limited stakeholders as the licence type for users who only need to follow internal status pages.[3]
Out of scope
This article does not cover the PD Reliability Platform seat model, which counts seats and includes stakeholder licences; see the separate article. It does not cover negotiated prices, which PagerDuty does not publish, nor the effect of reseller purchases beyond noting that they do not renew automatically under the Terms.[5]