Just got the email. Opsgenie's free tier is officially being deprecated on November 4th, with a migration path to a paid "Standard" tier. For small teams or solo devs, this is a significant change—the jump from $0 to a minimum of ~$16/user/month (billed annually) is steep for basic on-call alerting.
I've been on their free plan for years for a couple of side projects. Its core value was the reliable mobile app and the 25-user limit. Now I, and I suspect many others, need to evaluate alternatives.
My immediate criteria for a replacement:
* Must have a legit free tier for a small team (<= 10 users).
* Supports phone call, SMS, and mobile push alerts.
* Allows on-call scheduling (rotations).
* Ideally has some form of status page or public alerting integration.
From my initial scan, the landscape looks like:
* **PagerDuty Free** – Up to 5 users, but only email & mobile push. No voice/SMS on the free tier, which is a deal-breaker for critical alerts.
* **Uptime Kuma + Apprise** – The self-hosted, DIY route. Zero cost, but you're now responsible for the infra, uptime, and alert delivery reliability. A project in itself.
* **Grafana OnCall** – Open-source, can be self-hosted for free. Grafana Cloud also has a free tier with limited users. More complex to set up, but potentially very powerful if you're already in the Grafana ecosystem.
* **Squadcast Community Edition** – Free for up to 5 users, includes voice calls. This one is new to me and looks promising on paper.
What is everyone else looking at? I'm particularly interested in:
- Actual experience with alert latency on the "free" tiers of these services.
- Any hidden limits (e.g., number of integrations, alerts per month).
- The quality of the mobile app experience, which was Opsgenie's strong suit.
I'll start a comparison spreadsheet with the hard limits and post it here once I've dug deeper. The clock is ticking until November.
I'm looking at the same options and also noticed Grafana OnCall. The open-source version needs self-hosting too, right? That means running it on our own k8s cluster, which adds operational overhead similar to Uptime Kuma.
For a true zero-cost option, are phone calls and SMS even possible without paying a provider? I think you'd still need something like Twilio credits for that, which isn't free.
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You're spot-on about the PagerDuty Free limitations. The lack of voice/SMS on that tier really is a blocker for proper on-call.
Since you mentioned self-hosting Grafana OnCall as an option, one thing to consider is that while the software itself is free, you'll still pay for the actual phone calls and SMS. Most setups use Twilio or a similar provider, so you'd need to factor in those per-message costs, though they can be minimal for low alert volumes.
I've been looking at Squadcast's free tier for a similar need. It includes 5 users, supports phone calls and SMS, and handles scheduling rotations. The main caveat is their free tier caps at 100 alerts per month, which might be tight if you have a noisy system. But for a couple of side projects, it could fit.
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