Tink vs PagerDuty: On-Call Alerts Without the Per-Seat Pricing

PagerDuty is the gold standard for enterprise on-call management. If you have a 24/7 engineering rotation, multiple escalation tiers, and a dedicated platform team, it does its job exceptionally well. But for the freelancer managing 5 client servers or the two-person startup where "on-call" means "whoever sees the Slack message first," PagerDuty's pricing model creates a painful mismatch between what you need and what you pay.

Here's what most people don't realize until they're already three weeks into a PagerDuty trial: PagerDuty doesn't monitor your servers. It routes alerts from your monitoring tools. You still need Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or another tool to detect the problem. PagerDuty just decides who to wake up.

The hidden cost of PagerDuty for small teams

PagerDuty's pricing starts at $21 per user per month (annual billing). For a two-person team, that's $42/month. Add Datadog at its cheapest tier ($15/host/month for infrastructure monitoring), and a 5-server fleet costs you:

PagerDuty: $42/month (2 users)

Datadog: $75/month (5 hosts)

Total: $117/month minimum

For a solo freelancer managing client servers, $117/month before you've written a single line of code is a hard sell.

The pricing also scales with headcount, not infrastructure. Add a third engineer and your PagerDuty bill jumps immediately. Scale from 5 servers to 10 without adding people? Your bill stays the same. That's the wrong scaling model for infrastructure operations.

What PagerDuty is genuinely great at

Before going further: PagerDuty earned its reputation. If you have the following requirements, it's hard to beat:

Multi-tier escalation — Alert engineer A, wait 5 minutes, escalate to engineer B, wait 10 minutes, page the on-call manager. PagerDuty does this reliably with full audit trails.

Rotation scheduling — Define who's on-call each week, month, or on a custom rotation. Automatically shifts who receives alerts as schedules change. Handles holidays and time-off overrides.

700+ integrations — If your company runs Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, and three custom tools simultaneously, PagerDuty can aggregate all of that into a single on-call workflow.

Incident post-mortems — Built-in timeline reconstruction, status page integration (via StatusPage), and structured post-mortem templates.

For a 50-person engineering organization, this is table stakes. For a 3-person startup, it's overkill.

What most small teams actually need

In practice, most small teams need five things:

Detect when something breaks (monitoring)

Know what broke (diagnostics)

Get notified (alerts)

Fix it (remediation)

Know who's responsible (on-call tracking)

PagerDuty covers item 3 and 5. It requires separate tools — at additional cost — for items 1, 2, and 4. Tink covers all five.

How Tink approaches on-call for small teams

Tink takes a different architectural position: alerts should come from the same tool that does the monitoring. Every 5 minutes, Tink's agent scans the server, detects issues using heuristic rules and AI analysis, and sends alerts directly to the channels where your team already lives.

Alert routing without PagerDuty: Tink sends alerts to Telegram, Slack, Discord, Email, ntfy, WhatsApp, and webhook endpoints in parallel. For most small teams, "everyone gets the Telegram message" is a sufficient on-call policy.

On-call tracking: The /oncall @alice command stores who's currently on-call; their name appears in every critical alert. /oncall clear removes them. Simple, effective, no per-seat cost.

Incident acknowledgment: Critical alerts include an inline "✅ Acknowledge" button. Tapping it sends an acknowledgment confirmation and records who responded. This closes the "did you see this?" back-channel anxiety.

Quiet hours: /quiet 23-7 silences all notification channels from 11pm to 7am UTC. No alerts during off-hours unless you explicitly disable quiet hours.

Per-machine snooze: /snooze prod-3 4h silences alerts for a specific machine — useful during deploys or maintenance windows without silencing your entire fleet.

Diagnostics that PagerDuty doesn't provide

The biggest gap between PagerDuty and Tink isn't pricing — it's diagnosis. PagerDuty tells you "disk usage alert fired on prod-1." Tink tells you:

"Disk is at 89% on prod-1. At the current growth rate (~1.2 GB/day), it'll be full in approximately 6 days. The largest consumers are /var/log (12 GB) and /home/ubuntu/uploads (8 GB). Suggested fix: rotate logs with logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf and verify the uploads directory isn't accumulating stale files."

That's the difference between an alert and a diagnosis. PagerDuty gets you the alert. Tink gets you the alert, the cause, and the fix — executable with your approval from the same Telegram conversation.

Fix execution: the gap PagerDuty never fills

Here's the part that's easy to overlook in a pricing comparison: after PagerDuty pages you at 2am, you still have to SSH into the server, diagnose the issue, and fix it yourself. PagerDuty's job ends when it wakes you up.

Tink's fix plan feature proposes the specific commands needed to resolve each issue, explains the rationale, and executes them with your explicit approval. You can approve a fix from your phone — in Telegram — without opening a terminal. For an accidental sysadmin managing servers alongside their main job, this changes the calculus entirely.

When to choose PagerDuty

Despite the comparison, there are clear cases where PagerDuty is the right choice:

You have 10+ engineers and complex rotation schedules across time zones

You need strict escalation policies with guaranteed SLA timers

You're already deeply integrated with enterprise monitoring tools (Splunk, Dynatrace, ServiceNow)

Compliance requirements mandate formal incident management workflows

Your team has a dedicated DevOps or platform engineering function

These aren't small-team problems. If you're managing enterprise-grade infrastructure with an enterprise-sized team, PagerDuty's investment in incident orchestration pays off.

When to choose Tink

Tink is built for the other 90%:

Freelancers managing 2-10 client servers

Early-stage startups where the founders run the servers

Small agencies with shared infrastructure

Solo developers with production apps

Anyone who's been burned by a monitoring gap they didn't notice for hours

If your current on-call policy is "watch the Telegram channel," Tink formalizes that into a proper monitoring + alerting + diagnosis + remediation system at $9/machine/month — with no per-seat charges as your team grows.

Integrating Tink with PagerDuty

For teams that need Tink's AI diagnostics but also have PagerDuty for enterprise on-call management: they work together. Tink's webhook channel sends structured JSON payloads that PagerDuty's Events API can ingest directly. Tink detects the issue and generates the AI diagnosis; PagerDuty handles the escalation routing to the right engineer.

This is genuinely useful for mid-size teams: Tink covers the intelligence layer (what broke and why), PagerDuty covers the coordination layer (who handles it and when).

The bottom line

PagerDuty costs $21-64/user/month and requires a separate monitoring tool. For a 2-person team with 5 servers, the combined cost is $100-250/month before you've written any application code.

Tink costs $9/machine/month — $45/month for those same 5 servers — and includes monitoring, AI diagnostics, multi-channel alerts, on-call tracking, incident acknowledgment, and fix execution. No per-seat pricing. No add-ons required.

If you're managing servers as part of your job rather than as your entire job, that's the right tool.

Compare Tink and PagerDuty side-by-side at tink.bot/compare/tink-vs-pagerduty. Try Tink free at tink.bot/register — installs in 30 seconds.