Per agent charges you for the people who can log in. Per workspace charges the one account and stops looking at your head count after that. Per ticket and its newer relation, per resolution, both count the work itself passing through the thing, the one of them measuring at the door on the way in and the other at the door on the way out. Tiered is not really a fifth model at all, being more of a layer that sits over any of the others, on account of what it prices being which shelf of features your hand is allowed to reach.
That is the surface of the whole of it, and you can find that much on any vendor’s comparison page. The part worth a quarter of an hour sits underneath that. Each of the four decides something besides the size of your bill, on account of it also settling what your own team will quietly start going without, and nobody writes that bit into a contract anywhere. It happens anyway, every time. Most desks are eighteen months into the thing before anybody joins the two halves of it up.
We charge by the workspace over here at Maxdesk, so you know our interest in this before you read another line of it. What follows is still the honest version, including the two or three places where our own model is the wrong shape for a desk, and there is one component we sell that is metered by usage, which we will come to rather than leave you to find it.
The renewal that went up while nobody bought anything
Autumn goes well. You take on three people between September and Christmas, two on support and one who mostly does something else but ends up answering the shipping questions because she is quick at it.
In February the renewal lands and it is up by a third. Nobody bought a new product. Nobody upgraded anything, and the price per seat printed on the quote never moved by so much as a dollar. What moved was your own company, and the invoice was simply doing what it was always going to do, which was to follow head count wherever head count went.
That is not a scandal and no one was hard done by. It is a design decision made by somebody in a pricing meeting long before you ever signed, and the whole of it was visible in the quote if anybody had gone and read the quote as a forecast rather than as a price. Nobody does that. Fair is fair, the forecasting was yours to do. You read a quote as what it costs today, and today is the one month of the whole of it where the number is guaranteed to be right.
What each of the four actually counts
Worth being plain about the units before we go at the arguments, since half the confusion in this subject comes of two people using the word seat to mean different things entirely.
A seat, or an agent, means a login that can answer a customer. Some vendors count anybody who can see the desk at all, including a manager who only ever reads reports, and some count only the people who send replies, and that distinction is worth about a quarter of your bill on a mixed team so go and ask which one you are being sold.
Then the ticket, which is one conversation, and the resolution, which is one conversation that got finished, though the finishing of it gets decided by the software rather than by the customer, and that is a sentence we will be coming back to. A workspace means the account its self, the one desk, with the people inside of it uncounted. A tier is a bundle with a name on it, usually a metal or a size, holding features somebody has decided belong together. Funnily enough, that one is only packaging.
Per agent, and the people who never get a login
Here is the thing that per agent pricing does to a desk, and it has very little to do with the money.
Once a login costs forty or sixty a month, somebody in your company starts counting logins. Not out of meanness. It is simply that a seat has gone and become a thing worth thinking about, and the thinking gets done by whoever signs the invoices rather than by whoever answers the mail. So the warehouse supervisor, the man who could answer half your shipping questions in his sleep on account of him having packed the things his own self, does not get a seat. Nor does the accounts woman, and she is the one who knows exactly why that invoice looks wrong. As for the lad doing four hours of a Saturday, he costs the very same as somebody full time, so that was never going to happen.
And every one of those people still answers customers anyway. Of course they do, on account of the work not having gone anywhere at all. Funnily enough, the quick ones answer most. They answer by having mail forwarded to them, and they reply out of their own address, and what comes back from the customer lands in their own personal mailbox where nobody else on the desk will ever see it again.
So the record breaks. It breaks at precisely the seam you bought a ticketing system to close up, and it breaks quietly, and it will not show up in any report you run, on account of the report only ever seeing the conversations that stayed inside of it. The ones that went out through somebody’s own mail are simply not in the count. That is per agent pricing doing its work, and it does it to you through your own finance department rather than through the software at all.
Internal desks get this worse than customer-facing ones. On an IT ticketing system half the company has some legitimate reason to be in there occasionally, being the facilities man, the person who owns the building passes, whoever administers the payroll tool. Priced per head, one and all of them get left outside and go back to being chased in a chat app, and the desk you paid for ends up holding maybe two thirds of the work it was meant to hold.
None of which makes per agent wrong. If you have six support people and they are the only six who will ever touch it, per agent is clean, honest and easy to forecast, and there is not a bother on it.
Per ticket, per resolution, and the month you did well
Now the metered ones, which read as the fairest thing on the list until you sit with them a while.
Per ticket charges by volume, so a bad month costs you more than a good one. That sounds only right until you notice that a bad month is usually not your doing. A supplier missed a shipment, or a release went out with a fault in it, and now you are being charged extra for the privilege of dealing with the consequences of it. Worse than the money is the second effect, being that once tickets cost money somebody eventually asks whether that really needed to be a ticket. People start answering out of band to keep the count down, and you are back to the broken record again by a different road.
Then you have per resolution, the newer of the two, and it goes and arrives dressed up in the language of fairness. You pay when the thing gets closed, which sounds like paying for outcomes, and paying for outcomes sounds like the vendor’s interests and your own finally pointing the very same direction.
Two questions decide whether it is fair, mind you, and neither of them is usually answered in the quote. First, who decides a thing was resolved. If the software decides, and the customer writes back three days later still stuck, is that one resolution or two. Second, what counts as the machine having done it. Vendor deflection arithmetic has a long habit of counting anybody who opened a help article and then went away, and going away is not the same as being helped, though it does look identical from inside the analytics. There is more on the honest version of that over on customer self service.
We sell an AI customer support agent ourselves, so this is not us saying the work has no value. It is us saying that a per resolution meter puts the vendor’s revenue on the wrong side of your own improvement. Every fault you fix at the root, every answer you write once so it never gets asked again, takes money off them. Nobody is going to sabotage you over it and we are not suggesting anybody would. It is worth a bit of thought before you sign, all the same, since the arithmetic of it quietly does best in the years your own desk has a hard time.
The money that is not the model at all
Plenty of what you end up paying has nothing to do with which of the four is on the front page of the quote.
Minimums come first, being the ten seats you must buy when there are five of you, with half the bill going out the door for nobody at all. Then the annual up front, since the good price is usually the one you only get by paying twelve months ahead for a thing you have had eleven days. Onboarding, implementation, enablement, whatever it goes by the name of that quarter, can be a four figure sum landing before a single mail has been answered. And the price per seat has a habit of climbing as you go up the tiers, so growth costs you twice over, once for the extra people and once again for the shelf you had to move up to in order to hold them.
Then the quiet one. Nothing in a quote tells you what year two costs. You will find that out in month eleven, and by then the whole of your desk lives in there, and getting back out of it has gone and become a project with a plan and a date on it.
None of that is dishonest, to be honest with you. It is all disclosed somewhere, and it is all normal, and every vendor including ourselves is entitled to charge for the work of getting you started. It is simply that the model gets the whole of the attention in the comparison articles, while these five quietly settle most of the actual difference between two quotes.
Tiered, and the one feature sitting a floor above you
Tiered is the layer that decides what you can reach, and the trouble with it is nearly always singular rather than general.
You go through the feature grid and what you need is one thing. Rules that route billing mail to the billing person without anybody sorting a pile by hand, say, which is most of what helpdesk automation amounts to once you strip the word back to its self. It is not on your tier. It is one floor up, sat in a bundle beside nine other things you will never once open, and the floor costs double.
That is not somebody being sly, it is what packaging is for, and the vendor has to draw the line somewhere or there would be no tiers at all. What it asks of you is arithmetic. Work out what the one feature is worth to you on its own, in hours saved a month, and put that figure beside the difference between the two tiers. Sometimes it is plainly worth it and you sign the thing without a second thought. Sometimes you find you are paying six hundred a year for a routing rule and you go and do the sorting by hand for another six months, which is a perfectly respectable answer that no comparison table will ever suggest to you. Do the sum first. It takes ten minutes of your own time.
Per workspace, and what it does not fix
Per workspace charges for the desk rather than the people at it. Head count never enters the arithmetic, so hiring is free as far as the software is concerned, and the seat counting described further up simply has nothing to attach its self to.
Hiring stops costing you software money. What that buys you is not really the saving, mind you. It is that nobody in your company ever has a reason to keep somebody out of the system. The warehouse man gets a login on the day it occurs to somebody that he should have one, because the login is worth nothing, and his replies stay in the record with everything else, and that is the part that pays for its self over a couple of years.
Now the honest side of it. If you are one person, per workspace saves you nothing whatsoever, since a per agent plan for one seat is one seat and there is no cliff for you to fall off. If you are two or three, the difference is small enough that you should pick on the features and ignore this whole argument. It earns its keep somewhere north of about five people, and it earns it most on a desk where the head count is genuinely uncertain, which mostly means a company growing, or one with a seasonal shape to it where the desk doubles for eight weeks a year.
And per workspace does not abolish gating, it only moves where the gate ends up sitting. A vendor charging by the workspace still has to make the tiers different from one another somehow, so what gets rationed is features rather than people, and the thing you want may well still be a floor above you. We do that ourselves and it is described below without any softening, since it would be a bit rich to spend a section on tiering and then pretend we sit outside of it.
Free is a pricing model too, and it charges somewhere else
Three sorts of free turn up in this market and not one of the three is actually free, though only one of them is dishonest about it.
There is the free tier, which pays for its self with something other than money: ads, a limit on how long your history is kept, the vendor’s name travelling out on your mail, a ceiling on some feature you have not yet noticed you rely on. Fair enough, provided the terms are on the page rather than three clicks in.
Self-hosting is the second sort, where the licence costs nothing and the rest of it costs a great deal. Somebody has to patch the thing, back it up, keep the mail flowing on a Sunday afternoon, and be reachable the week it stops. That is a salaried evening, over and over, and we have written the whole of that argument out on open source ticketing system rather than repeat it here.
And there is the free thing you already have, being the shared inbox sat in whatever mail provider you pay for anyway. What it charges you is searching. Twenty minutes of a Tuesday spent working out what was already said to a customer by somebody who is off sick, and the charge is small enough each time that it never once appears anywhere you would go looking for it. Where that stops being a fair trade is set out in when a shared inbox becomes a ticketing system.
Putting two quotes beside each other without fooling your own self
Four bits of arithmetic and it takes about twenty minutes, and it is the only way two different models can be compared at all.
Do it on paper. Take the yearly figure rather than the monthly, on account of monthly numbers being designed to feel small. Add the onboarding fee into year one, all of it, since that is the year you actually pay it. Then run the very same sum again at your head count plus five, because you are not buying this for today, you are buying it for the three years you will realistically stay put in it. That third number is the one that separates the models, and it is the one nobody calculates.
Then divide the year one total by the number of conversations your desk handled last year. Not the mails, the conversations, near enough. What you get is what each conversation cost you in software, which is a narrower cousin of cost per ticket, and it is usually a shockingly small figure, and it is the only currency in which a per seat quote and a per workspace quote and a metered quote can stand beside one another and be honestly read. A team of four with a busy desk sometimes finds the expensive-looking option is the cheap one per conversation. Twelve people answering forty mails a month between them will find the opposite, and they will find it inside of ninety seconds.
If you are doing this for a small company specifically, the selection criteria that matter beyond price are written up separately as customer service software for small business.
What we charge, said plainly
Run our own numbers through the test above rather than take our word for anything.
Maxdesk is a help desk built on one shared address, and the bill goes against the workspace. The free plan is $0 and carries unlimited people. Pro is $20 a month against the workspace, so $240 for a year, and that is $240 whether the desk is three of you or thirteen of you, which is the whole of the arithmetic and there is not much more to say about it. Elite is $99 a month against the workspace and adds an AI layer over the lot.
What the free plan costs instead of money, set out where you can see it: your history rolls at three months, so the far end of it goes quietly away as you go along. There are ads, and they sit on your side of the workspace where your own team sees them, never on anything a customer receives. Every reply your people send away carries our name down the bottom of it. And only so many automations may run at the one time, a cap most desks walk into around their second month rather than in the first week of us. The $20 plan clears the ads, hands you back your own name on outgoing mail, and takes the history out to twelve months. The $99 one holds twenty four months and brings the AI.
Everything a desk actually runs on is in the free plan and stays there, meaning the record, the states, the assignment, the SLAs, the roles, the audit trail, the knowledge base. We did not hold the working parts back to sell them to you later. The mail handling end of it has a page of its own at email management software if that is the narrower question you came in with.
Where our own model is the wrong shape
Four of them, and the first is the one we sell metered.
The AI layer on Elite comes with an allowance of five thousand AI responses a month and you buy packs beyond that. So one component of what we sell does count the work, and a page spending a section on the trouble with meters cannot go and stay quiet about its own. The difference we would argue for is narrow but real: that meter decides how much machine answering you get, and it never decides which of your people are allowed a login. The rationing it can cause lands on the software rather than on your colleagues. Judge for your own self whether that distinction is worth anything, rather than take it from us.
Then there is the channel question, since mail is all we read. No chat widget, nobody here answers a phone, and there is no portal for a customer to log into, nor is any of the three sat on a roadmap waiting its turn. If what actually ails you is that your customers would sooner chat, then our pricing is not the page you want to be reading.
The AI, next, only comes at $99 and there is no way of buying that one piece on its own, which is exactly the floor-above-you problem described further up, and we are doing it too. If the AI is the only thing you want and the rest of Elite means nothing to you, then you are paying for a bundle to get one item out of it, the very thing we told you to do the arithmetic on.
And three months of rolling history on the free plan is short if you are in work where a dispute can come back at you in November over something settled in August. By then August has rolled off and gone. On a page about paying for things, that is worth knowing before you build a year of your record on the free tier and find the early end of it missing.
A quarter of an hour with last year’s invoices
Go and get twelve months of what you already pay for support software, and put the onboarding fee back in if you paid one and have forgotten about it, which most people have.
Divide the whole of it by the number of conversations the desk handled in the same year. That is your cost per conversation today, and it is the number to hold in your head through every demo you sit through this quarter. Then work the very same figure at your head count plus three, and if that second number is meaningfully bigger while the work stays the same size, what you are looking at is a bill that follows hiring rather than one that follows the work.
Some teams go and do this and find they are fine and go back to their day, and that is a good outcome, and the whole of it took them twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, near enough. Others find they have been paying for eleven seats while six people ever log in, and they go and make a case out of it on the Monday.