Free Help Desk Software with Unlimited Agents & Tickets

So where is the catch

There is one. We are not going to pretend otherwise, because every free plan on earth says there is no catch and then you find it your own self about six weeks in, usually on the morning you were planning to do something else.

Ours sits in two places, and both of them are dull rather than sinister, which is rather the point of telling you.

The first one is history. The free plan holds a rolling 3 months of ticket data, reports and audit trail. Pro takes that out to 12 months and Elite gives you 24.

The word rolling is doing the work in that sentence, and it is worth pinning down. The 3 months is measured from the ticket’s latest activity, not from the date it was first opened. If a ticket is opened, replied to, reopened, assigned or updated in any way, the clock resets from that most recent activity. So a ticket first raised in March that is reopened in July has its window counted from July, not March.

Open tickets stay available while they are active. Only tickets that have been closed or inactive for more than 3 months may be removed from active storage. And nothing is deleted when you upgrade to Pro or Elite. You simply get 12 or 24 months of history unlocked and the older data is still there.

So if you happen to be a compliance-heavy shop that needs years of the stuff sat in a searchable archive, then Free is honestly not the plan for you, and we would far rather you knew that today than discover it in month four with an auditor stood over your shoulder.

The second is that the free workspace is ad supported, and there is Maxdesk branding on outbound mail. Pro removes both. That is the trade, and we think it is a better trade than the one everybody else offers, for a reason worth spelling out.

Why we limit history instead of limiting your team

Look at what the other free plans in this category actually cap. Most of them stop you at two or three agents. The pattern is that they put the limit on the number of humans you employ, which means the moment you hire your fourth person you are having a conversation with a salesperson, and you did not wake up that morning wanting one.

That always struck us as a slightly mad way to run a business. You are charging your customer more money at the precise moment they start doing well, and you are taxing the one thing they are trying to do, which is grow. A support team getting bigger is not a thing anybody should be punished for. Fair is fair.

So we put the limit somewhere it does not tax growth. A team of four costs the same as a team of forty on Maxdesk, which is nothing, and it will carry on costing nothing. Nobody from our side is going to ring you up about it. We do not count your agents on Free, we do not count them on Pro, and we do not count them on the $99 Elite plan either. There is no seat maths anywhere in this company.

What a help desk actually costs everywhere else

It is worth doing the sums here, since the per agent model has a way of hiding just how fast it runs away from you once the team starts filling out. Take a support team of ten people, which is not by any stretch a big team.

Elsewhere in this category, ten seats on a mid-tier plan typically lands somewhere between $450 and $600 a month depending on the vendor. That number goes up the day you hire your eleventh person, and it keeps going up, and it usually does not include the add-ons that always turn out to be the bit you needed.

On Maxdesk that same team pays $0, and so does a team of fifty. Our number does not move when you hire somebody, because the number was never attached to how many people you have in the first place.

Help desk, service desk, ticketing system: what is the difference

These three get thrown about as if they all mean the same thing, and most of the time nobody much cares either way, but the distinction is worth about thirty seconds of your attention since it quietly changes what you ought to be shopping for in the first place.

A ticketing system is the machinery sat underneath the whole thing. Something arrives, it becomes a ticket, that ticket picks up an owner and a status and a priority, and then it moves along the line until somebody finally closes it out. That is the engine, and on its own it does not much care who is writing in.

A help desk is what you put around that engine when the people writing in are your customers. Email to ticket, canned replies, a knowledge base they can search before they even write in, CSAT at the end to tell you whether the whole thing worked.

A service desk is the same engine pointed inward, at your own staff, and usually inside an ITSM frame with change management and asset tracking bolted on. That is dedicated ITSM territory.

Maxdesk is a help desk with a ticketing system inside it, and it does the internal IT job perfectly well if that is what you need. It is not a full ITSM suite and we are not going to tell you it is.

Who this is actually for

Teams of every size, honestly. Startups shuffling off a shared email inbox where everybody can see everything and nobody is entirely sure who has picked this one up. Growing support teams watching their tool bill creep up and unable to see why it should scale with headcount. And larger organisations who want the same product without the per-seat maths tax at the end of every quarter.

For enterprise-scale needs there is an enterprise plan with the reliability, security review, procurement paths and dedicated support that a larger buyer expects. If that sounds like you, get in touch and we will talk through what your team actually needs.

Moving over from somewhere else

If you are coming across from another help desk, write in and we will do the migration for you. Tickets, contacts, knowledge base articles. We will not hand you a CSV export and wish you luck, which is more or less the standard experience in this industry and one of several reasons we started building this thing in the first place.