PagerDuty
Incident alerting service in Developer tools
Criticized more than recommended: critics find it complex and costly as teams grow; those who recommend it cite reliable alerting that reaches you when systems fail and staying up when your own service doesn't.
7 people recommended PagerDuty in Hacker News comments, 2 had mixed feelings and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from the comments below.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- mixed feelings
- 2
- warn against or regret it
- 8
The record
Recommended in 5 of 12 months
In 6 different threads.
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 6 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 29% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 14 of the 19 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Switching to alternatives
“Pagerduty does not handle payments in our country "properly". So we are replacing it.”
Comment from 23 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?” “I got more confident replacing PagerDuty next”
Comment from 30 May 2026 in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows” Too complex for small teams
“we're not using pagerduty as it's too complex for us, as we're quite small company”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: How does PagerDuty's site still not have a dark mode?” “These ready-made solutions have many features, and they are complex.”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: What Makes AI a Bubble?” Per-seat pricing gets expensive
“2-3x pricing because you have more people always felt like a cash grab”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years” “PD doubles the prices for them”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Reliable alerting when systems signal
“the value of PagerDuty is its reliability in notifying you when it receives a signal from a system”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “After 12 years of being a customer, Uber is dumping PagerDuty” “Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp” Dependable infrastructure others rely on
“generally useful and provide the infrastructure needed for other things to work”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)” “The point is that PagerDuty is up even if your service isn't.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Software Survival 3.0”
What people said
14 of the 19 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Pagerduty does not handle payments in our country "properly". So we are replacing it.”
“being unable to ack or snooze a critical alert on your phone at 1 AM is a whole new level of frustration”
“generally useful and provide the infrastructure needed for other things to work”
“the value of PagerDuty is its reliability in notifying you when it receives a signal from a system”
“I'm a happy PagerDuty customer”
“I got more confident replacing PagerDuty next”
“These ready-made solutions have many features, and they are complex.”
“2-3x pricing because you have more people always felt like a cash grab”
“PD doubles the prices for them”
“they have to protect their secret sauce of calling an API and showing notifications”
“The point is that PagerDuty is up even if your service isn't.”
“Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion”
“we're not using pagerduty as it's too complex for us, as we're quite small company”
“Might be wise though to have PagerDuty configured to re-alert if the outage persists.”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.