A PagerDuty alternative for teams that only need paging
If you opened the pricing page, multiplied by the size of your team, and thought I am not paying that for a thing that rings a phone, this page is for you.
Two separate objections usually arrive together. The product is bigger than the problem, and the price is bigger than the part you would actually use. Acked answers both by being small on purpose: schedules, escalation, paging and history, at a flat price that does not count people.
The pricing model, which is the actual difference
Per-seat paging prices the thing you least want to economise on. The bill grows with the size of the rotation, so the cheapest configuration is the one where fewer people share the pager. Teams do the math and quietly shrink the rotation to fit the budget, which means the same three people carry it.
Acked charges a flat monthly price per tier and every tier includes unlimited users. Adding the fourth engineer to the rotation costs nothing, so the tool stops being a reason not to.
| Tier | Price | Users | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Unlimited | Under 50 alerts a month. 3 schedules, 1 escalation policy, 30-day history. |
| Team | $49 a month | Unlimited | 50 to a few hundred alerts a month. Unlimited schedules and policies, SSO, 1-year history. |
| Business | $299 a month | Unlimited | Hundreds of alerts a month. SAML, SCIM, RBAC, 3-year history, 99.9% SLA. |
There is no per-user add-on underneath the flat number, and no alert quota that turns into an overage line. The one thing priced by usage is voice calls, because a phone call has a real per-minute cost and pretending otherwise would mean charging everybody for the people who use it.
What Acked does
- On-call schedules. Rotations with layers and overrides, so the right person is on call without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
- Escalation that does not give up. An unacknowledged alert climbs the chain until somebody answers, then tells you nobody did.
- Paging that gets through. Push on iOS and Android, including critical alerts that ring past the silent switch and Focus. Email as well.
- Alerts from anything that can POST JSON. Datadog, Prometheus Alertmanager and Grafana have first-class formats. Everything else sends a title and a key.
- Outbound webhooks, signed, for Slack or your own systems.
- A full history. Every state change is an append-only record: who was paged, what they did, when, and every delivery attempt with its outcome.
What Acked does not do
This list is the point of the product, so it is on the page rather than in a comparison table nobody scrolls to.
- No status pages.
- No postmortem or retrospective workflow.
- No service catalog or dependency map.
- No AI incident summaries, copilots or auto-triage.
- No workflow builder, no automation rules engine.
If you need those, buy the platform that has them. That is a real answer and it is the right one for some teams. Acked is for the teams who looked at that platform and realised they were about to pay for a category when what they needed was paging.
When PagerDuty is the right answer
When the paging is the small part. If you are running a service catalog, publishing status pages to customers, driving postmortems through a defined workflow, or standardising incident response across many teams who do not talk to each other, you want a platform, and swapping it for a pager will cost you more than it saves.
The teams Acked fits are the other ones: a handful of engineers, a rotation, some monitors, and a need for the phone to ring at 3am and keep ringing until somebody says they have it.
Moving over
Paging is easier to move than most tools because the integration surface is small: monitors point somewhere, and people carry a phone.
- Create a service in Acked. It comes with an ingest URL already minted.
- Add the same URL as a second destination on one monitor. Do not remove the old one yet. Both tools page for a while, which is noisy and which is the point.
- Rebuild the rotation. Schedules and escalation steps are the part worth re-reading rather than copying. Most teams find layers they no longer need.
- Run in parallel through one real incident, or through a deliberate test at an inconvenient hour. A paging tool that has never woken you is a paging tool you have not tested.
- Cut the old destination when the same page has arrived from Acked and you believed it.
See the quickstart for the five-minute version, and sending alerts for payload formats and deduplication.