If your team is small, based in India, and mostly needs a phone to ring when something breaks, a full incident platform like PagerDuty may be more than you need. A simpler tool such as Edesy OnCall monitors your sites, cron jobs and alert feeds, phones people in English or Hindi, and escalates until someone presses 1, with a free plan and rupee billing. But it lacks things larger teams depend on: on-call schedules and rotations, SMS, Slack and Teams alerts, and status pages. This post sets out both sides so you can choose.
We make Edesy OnCall, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to be specific about what it doesn't do.
What PagerDuty-class tools do
PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Better Stack, Grafana OnCall, incident.io, Squadcast and similar tools are incident management platforms. Depending on vendor and plan, they typically offer:
- On-call schedules and rotations: weekly rotas, follow-the-sun across time zones, overrides when someone is on leave
- Many alert channels: push notifications from a mobile app, SMS, phone calls, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Hundreds of integrations with monitoring, ticketing and CI tools
- Status pages for customers
- Incident workflows: roles, chat-ops, postmortems, analytics
- Maintenance windows and alert grouping rules
Features, limits and prices differ a lot by vendor and plan, and they change often. Check each one's current pricing page. Prices are usually in US dollars per user per month, which matters to a small Indian team on a rupee budget.
What Edesy OnCall does
| Capability | Edesy OnCall |
|---|---|
| HTTP and keyword checks | Yes (GET, HEAD, POST; expected status; keyword present or absent) |
| TCP port checks | Yes |
| Cron heartbeats | Yes, with ?status=fail to report a failure immediately |
| Alert webhooks | Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana, Uptime Kuma, generic JSON |
| Phone call alerts | Yes, press 1 to acknowledge, press 2 to escalate |
| Call language | English or Hindi, chosen per contact |
| Email alerts | Yes, with a one-click acknowledge button |
| Escalation policies | Up to 10 steps, waits per step, repeat up to 10 times |
| Incident timeline | Yes: who was called, who acknowledged, how |
| Pricing | Free Rs 0; Starter Rs 499/month; Pro Rs 1,499/month; calls per minute from your wallet |
| On-call schedules, rotations, overrides | No |
| SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams alerts | No |
| Status pages | No |
| Maintenance windows | No |
| Ping, SSL-expiry or DNS checks | No |
| Checks from several regions | No |
| Mobile app | No |
OnCall also needs an Edesy phone number in your workspace, used as the caller ID on alert calls.
Choose a full platform when...
| You need | Why OnCall isn't the fit |
|---|---|
| Rotations across 5+ engineers, time zones or overrides | OnCall's policies call the same people every time; you edit them by hand |
| Alerts in Slack or Teams, or SMS | OnCall alerts by call and email only |
| A customer-facing status page | Not part of OnCall |
| Push notifications to a mobile app | OnCall has no app |
| Maintenance windows to silence planned work | Not available; pause the monitor instead |
| Incident roles, postmortems, analytics | OnCall keeps a timeline per incident, nothing more |
| Checks from several countries | OnCall checks don't run from multiple regions |
OnCall fits when...
| Your situation | Why it works |
|---|---|
| 1 to 10 people, a simple "who to call" order | Escalation policies cover it without schedule management |
| People miss email and chat alerts at night | A ringing phone with press 1 is hard to ignore |
| Some of the team prefer Hindi | Each contact gets the call in English or Hindi |
| You pay in rupees | Plans in rupees, calls billed from your Edesy wallet |
| You already run Prometheus, Grafana or Uptime Kuma | Send their alerts to an OnCall webhook and keep your setup |
| You want to try it without a contract or a card | The Free plan has 3 monitors and 2 contacts; new accounts get Rs 20 credit |
| You run an agency and watch client sites | Free monitors to start, Pro for up to 100 |
The rotation gap, honestly
The biggest thing OnCall lacks for growing teams is schedules. In OnCall, "on call" is whoever you put in step 1 of the policy. If you rotate weekly, someone has to change step 1 every week. For two or three people that's a calendar reminder. For ten engineers in two time zones it becomes error-prone, and a scheduling tool earns its cost.
A common middle path: keep your rotation in a scheduling tool and use OnCall only as a call channel for alerts that must wake someone, especially in Hindi. Or start on OnCall while the team is small and move when rotations become painful.
Cost, roughly
| Edesy OnCall | |
|---|---|
| Free | Rs 0: 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, 2 contacts |
| Starter | Rs 499/month: 20 monitors, 60-second checks, 5 contacts |
| Pro | Rs 1,499/month: 100 monitors, 30-second checks, 25 contacts |
| Alert calls | Billed per minute from your Edesy wallet at your workspace rate |
Plans are flat per workspace, not per user. Prices exclude 18% GST. Plans are set by the Edesy team: start free and ask support to move up. See OnCall pricing and plans and billing. For competitor costs, use each vendor's own pricing page.
To judge how much alerting is worth to you, work out an hour of downtime with the downtime cost calculator.
How to try OnCall alongside what you have
- Sign in at oncall.edesy.in and connect your workspace (you need an Edesy number as caller ID).
- Add a contact, verify the phone with the code call, and choose English or Hindi.
- Create an Alert webhook monitor and point your existing tool at it: Alertmanager, Grafana, Uptime Kuma or generic JSON.
- Build a two-step escalation policy and send a test call.
Phone alerts depend on telecom networks, phones and wallet balance, and can be delayed. Don't make any single tool the only alarm for life-critical systems.
More: the OnCall overview, the features page and why phone call alerts beat email and Slack.
FAQ
Is Edesy OnCall a full PagerDuty replacement?
No. OnCall does monitoring, phone call and email alerts, and escalation policies. It does not have on-call schedules, rotations, SMS, Slack or Teams alerts, status pages or maintenance windows. It suits small teams that mainly need a phone to ring.
What is the cheapest way to get phone call alerts in India?
Edesy OnCall has a Free plan with 3 monitors and 2 contacts. Alert calls are billed per minute from your Edesy wallet in rupees, and new accounts get Rs 20 of welcome credit. Paid plans are Rs 499 and Rs 1,499 a month, excluding 18% GST.
Can I use OnCall alongside another incident tool?
Yes. OnCall accepts webhooks from Alertmanager, Grafana, Uptime Kuma and any tool that can post JSON, so you can keep your existing monitoring and add Hindi or English phone calls with press-1 acknowledgement.
When should I choose PagerDuty or a similar platform instead?
When you need rotations across several people or time zones, many alert channels, deep integrations, status pages, or incident workflows like postmortems. Check each vendor's current plans, as features and prices change.
Start free with 3 monitors at oncall.edesy.in.