I agree, 2-3x pricing because you have more people always felt like a cash grab, similar to an SSO Tax. We also have a lot of complex Pagerduty configurations and their APIs are painful. Why do timestamps drift, templates get updated but don't show drift, and identifiers are not the same between UI and API. I regret implementing within Terraform and would rather just let teams manage their own on-call sadly.

PagerDuty's pricing trajectory is following the exact same playbook as Datadog. Start cheap enough that teams adopt it without finance approval, then jack up per-seat pricing once it's embedded in every runbook and escalation policy.

The insidious part with on-call tooling specifically is that switching costs are higher than almost any other category. Your escalation chains, schedules, integrations with monitoring, incident templates, post-mortem workflows - it all becomes organizational muscle memory. Migrating monitoring backends is a weekend project compared to migrating on-call routing.

What I've seen work: teams that treat on-call routing as a thin layer rather than a platform. If your schedules live in something portable (even a YAML file synced to whatever tool) and your alert routing is OpenTelemetry-native, swapping the actual dispatch tool becomes manageable. The teams that get locked in are the ones who build their entire incident process inside PD's UI.