ntfy.sh vs PagerDuty: Why Free Push Notifications Are Good Enough for Most Ops Teams

PagerDuty is the gold standard for enterprise incident management. It also starts at $21 per user per month, requires weeks of configuration, and assumes you have multiple on-call engineers, escalation policies, and dedicated ops staff managing the tool.

If that's your situation, PagerDuty makes sense.

If you're a freelancer managing three client servers, a two-person startup watching a production cluster, or an accidental sysadmin who just needs to know when your server is down — you don't need PagerDuty. You need a way to get a push notification on your phone when something breaks.

That's exactly what ntfy.sh does. For free.

What Is ntfy.sh?

ntfy.sh is a free, open-source push notification service. You subscribe to a topic URL, and anything that POSTs to that URL sends you a notification on iOS, Android, or desktop.

The entire API is a single HTTP POST:

curl -d "nginx is down on prod-1" ntfy.sh/your-topic-name

That sends a push notification to every device subscribed to your-topic-name. No API key required. No account needed. No configuration file. One command.

You can self-host ntfy on your own server if you want full control. Or use ntfy.sh's hosted version for free.

PagerDuty: What You're Actually Paying For

PagerDuty's core value proposition is on-call orchestration at scale:

Escalation policies (alert Person A, then Person B if not acknowledged in 5 minutes, then wake up Person C)

Rotation schedules (Alice is on-call Monday–Thursday, Bob is on-call Friday–Sunday)

Alert grouping and noise reduction across hundreds of alert sources

Post-incident analytics and retrospective reporting

Deep integrations with 700+ monitoring tools (Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch, etc.)

SLA and MTTD/MTTR tracking for compliance and executive reporting

If you need any of those features, PagerDuty earns its cost.

But here's what most small teams actually need:

Get a notification on my phone when my server is down

Know which machine is affected

Be able to dismiss it when I've dealt with it

That's it. And ntfy handles all three for free.

The Real Comparison: Small Team Alerting

Feature | ntfy.sh | PagerDuty
Push notifications | Free, unlimited | $21+/user/month
iOS/Android support | Yes (native app) | Yes
Setup time | 60 seconds | Hours to days
Self-hostable | Yes (open source) | No
Multi-channel delivery | POST to multiple topics | Yes (escalation policies)
On-call schedules | Manual (one topic) | Built-in
Alert deduplication | Your tool's responsibility | Built-in
Acknowledgment tracking | No | Yes
Escalation policies | No | Yes
Retrospective analytics | No | Yes

For a single sysadmin or a small team, the missing features in ntfy aren't dealbreakers — they're features you don't need yet.

Where ntfy Falls Short (and What to Do About It)

ntfy is a delivery mechanism, not an alerting system. The gaps that matter:

1. No deduplication. If your monitoring tool fires 50 times for the same disk alert, you get 50 notifications. This is your monitoring tool's job to fix, not ntfy's. Tink, for example, fingerprints alerts and only fires once per unique issue cluster.

2. No escalation. If you sleep through the alert, nothing escalates. For solo sysadmins, this is fine — you're the only person anyway. For teams of 2-3, you can set up two ntfy topics and have both subscribed, giving you effective multi-person notification without escalation logic.

3. No acknowledgment tracking. You can't tap "Acknowledged" in ntfy and have it log who responded. If you need audit trails, you need something else. Tink's Telegram integration handles this with inline "✅ Acknowledge" buttons that record who tapped it.

4. No alert history. ntfy shows current notifications, not a history of what fired and when. Your monitoring tool's incident log covers this.

For most small teams running 1-20 servers: none of these are blockers.

The Pricing Reality Check

Let's run the numbers for a 3-person startup with 5 servers:

PagerDuty Team plan: $21 × 3 people = $63/month ntfy.sh: $0/month

Over a year, that's $756 in alerting software that delivers the same push notification to your phone.

The $756 doesn't buy you better notifications. It buys escalation automation and enterprise reporting. If those features are idle because your team is too small to need them, you're burning money.

Alternatively, that $756 buys you 84 months of Tink's Mechanic plan — which includes monitoring, AI diagnostics, push notifications via ntfy, plus Telegram, Slack, Discord, email, and WhatsApp alerts, plus automated weekly digests, plus predictive alerts, plus SSH brute-force detection, plus supervised fix execution.

The Right Mental Model

Think of alerting tooling on a spectrum:

Free tier (0–10 servers, small team):

ntfy.sh for push

Email (free with your existing provider)

Telegram bot for conversational alerts

Total cost: $0

Mid-tier ($9-29/month, growing team):

Tink for monitoring, AI diagnostics, and multi-channel delivery (includes ntfy, Slack, Discord, email, WhatsApp)

Everything works together without stitching together multiple tools

Total cost: $9/month per machine

Enterprise tier ($50-100+/user/month, large org):

PagerDuty for on-call orchestration

Datadog or New Relic for observability

Dedicated ops staff to manage both

Total cost: thousands per month

The mistake small teams make is jumping to enterprise tier tools before they need them. PagerDuty for a solo sysadmin is like buying a commercial kitchen before you've learned to cook — technically excellent, but you spend more time managing the tools than doing the work.

Why Tink Includes ntfy

Tink added ntfy.sh integration because it's the cleanest zero-friction mobile alert path for technical users who don't want Telegram or aren't in a Slack workspace. Setup takes 60 seconds:

Install the ntfy app on your phone

Subscribe to a unique topic (e.g., ntfy.sh/prod-alerts-yourname)

Add the topic URL in your Tink dashboard

Done — you'll get push notifications for critical issues, all-clears, and machine offline alerts

No PagerDuty account. No credit card. No configuration files. Just your phone and a URL.

When your disk hits 92% at 2am, you get a push notification that says "prod-1 needs attention — Disk capacity is running low (92%)" and a follow-up "prod-1 is all clear" when the issue resolves. That's the entire use case.

The Bottom Line

PagerDuty is excellent software for teams that need on-call orchestration at scale. ntfy is excellent software for teams that need push notifications.

Most small teams need push notifications. Buy the tool that fits the problem.

If you're running 1-10 servers with a team of 1-5 people: ntfy.sh handles your alerting needs for free. Layer a tool like Tink on top for monitoring, diagnostics, and fix suggestions — and you have a complete ops stack for $9/month per machine.

PagerDuty will still be there when you grow into needing it.

Tink includes ntfy.sh, Telegram, Slack, Discord, email, and WhatsApp as first-class notification channels. Install on any Linux server in one command: curl -fsSL https://tink.bot/install | sh