Free Help Desk Software, and the Price List of What Free Costs

Free help desk software is a full support desk that costs no money. The mail comes in, becomes tickets with owners and states, and a small team works the queue without anybody ever buying a licence. Ours goes by the name of Maxdesk, and the free plan is the product its self rather than a sample of it, the very same desk the paid plans run, with the four costs below standing in the place of a bill. This page is the shop window. Expect it to be selling to you the whole way down, that is what a shop window is for. What you should not have to do is go hunting for the catch, so we will open with the catches, all four of them, before we get anywhere near the good parts.

The trade has trained everybody to read the word free with one eyebrow up, and fair is fair, the trade earned that. Free plans in this market have a habit of being trials wearing a longer coat, two agents and fifty tickets and a fortnight, built so that the first ordinary month you have breaks the ceiling and out comes the card. Ours is not built that way. The proof is not in this paragraph either, it is in the four after it, on account of the only honest way to prove a free plan being to show where the money comes from instead.

Adverts, to start with. They show inside the workspace, on your team’s side of the glass. The people writing to you never see one anywhere, not in a reply, not in a notification, nowhere. Your agents will notice them the way you notice adverts anywhere else, and that is the deal, plainly said, the plainest of the four costs and the easiest one to weigh up before you give us an address.

Our name travels on your mail as well. Every reply leaving a free workspace goes out with a small Maxdesk credit sitting under the signature, which is how a fair share of new workspaces first hear of us. Twenty dollars a month takes it off and puts your own name back on the whole of it.

Then the memory of the thing. The record keeps a rolling three months of its self on the free plan, so April is gone by August. For a two-person desk answering shipping questions that is usually nothing at all, and plenty of desks live happily inside the window for years on end without once feeling the far edge of it. For a desk where a dispute can surface in November about a thing settled in the summer it is genuinely not enough, and we would sooner you knew that here than went and found it out in November. The paid plans keep twelve and twenty four months apiece.

And there is a ceiling on the automations, meaning only so many may run at the one time on the free plan. Routing rules, tagging, auto-assignment, the lot of it works on free, up to a cap that most desks go and meet somewhere in their second month, once the first few rules have proved their worth and somebody wants five more. That one is deliberate, truth be told. It is the line in the plan that is there to be grown out of.

That is the entire price list. Nothing else on the free plan is held back, metered, or waiting to expire on you. What a desk genuinely runs on stays put and stays free: the ticketing system underneath it, states and assignment, the SLA clocks, roles, the audit trail, the knowledge base, each bit of it included for good rather than dangled at you.

The setup is shorter than this page. You point your support address at the workspace, support at your domain forwarded on, and from that minute each mail arriving turns into a ticket carrying an owner, a state, and a clock that started the moment your customer pressed send rather than the moment somebody got round to noticing. Two of you can be in the queue at the one time without answering the very same person twice, which is most of what a shared inbox promise amounts to. And the record of who said what stays put when somebody leaves in the spring.

The rules engine, our helpdesk automation, takes over the sorting that somebody would otherwise be doing by hand each morning. Billing words go to the billing person, the word urgent goes to the top of the pile, the returning customer goes to whoever had them last. And the knowledge base sits beside the queue, so the answer you have now written nine times gets written a tenth time properly and pointed at from then on.

A share of the people landing on this page went looking for free help desk software to download, so let us save you the reading. There is nothing to download over here. The desk runs in the browser, hosted by us, patched by us, backed up by us, and the trade word for that arrangement is hosted, or cloud, depending on which brochure you happen to be reading that week.

What the download crowd is usually after is one of two different things, and the two have different answers. Some want the mail kept on their own machines, for compliance or for comfort, and for them the honest path is self-hosting, licence free and labour dear. We went and wrote the whole of that trade-off up at open source ticketing system rather than pretend the option does not exist, since for some desks it is genuinely the right call. And some only want to know the thing will not vanish out from under them, which is the forever question, and the forever question gets a straight answer in the questions further down.

Hosted means the maintenance evenings belong to somebody else, mind you. When the mail stops flowing at half nine on a Sunday, that is our pager going off and not a salaried evening of yours, and on a desk of three people that single fact is worth more than most features. The trade is that you are trusting us with the record, which is a real trade and not a footnote, and it is why the export answer below is written the way it is written.

Every plan we sell, the free one included, takes as many agents as you care to add. It is not a misprint. It reads like one against the rest of the market, where the seat is the meter and ten people cost five times what two people cost, so it deserves a plain explanation rather than a slogan.

We bill the workspace, one desk, one price, whoever is inside it. The trade calls this a freemium model and the mechanics are no secret, and the wider argument about how the models differ sits on its own page as help desk pricing models. The ads and the footer pay a little. Some share of free desks grow into paid ones the month the history window or the automation ceiling starts pinching, and that upgrade money carries the rest of it, an arrangement that has suited the both of us well enough to keep. Nobody upgrades because hiring got dear, since hiring costs nothing here, and that is the difference we would put money on you feeling first. The warehouse man who knows the shipping answers gets a login the day it occurs to you, on account of the login being worth nothing, and his answers land in the record instead of leaking out through his personal mail.

We will not re-run the whole per-seat argument here, one paragraph is enough for a page like this. But if you have ever watched a renewal climb by a third in a February when nobody bought anything, you already know the shape of it, and you can guess why we built the bill the other way up.

A desk of one to three people, mail-first, a few hundred conversations a month, lives on the free plan indefinitely and we are content with that arrangement, genuinely. A help desk at that size needs the record, the states, a couple of rules, and history about three months deep. That is precisely the free plan, and not by accident. Small operations weighing the wider field have customer service software for small business to be going on with, a piece aimed at that reader and mentioning us the once.

An IT ticketing system for a small company sits well on it too, funnily enough, and for the same billing reason: half the building wants occasional access to an internal desk, and here that costs nothing per head, so the desk ends up holding the whole of the work rather than the official slice of it.

Now the other side of it. A desk that lives on the phone or in a chat widget should not buy us at any price including zero. Mail is the only channel we read. No phone, no chat, no portal for customers to log into, and not one of the three is coming on a roadmap we could show you. A regulated desk that must produce last year’s correspondence on demand cannot sit on a three-month window, so that one is a $20 decision from the first day, and we would rather write that sentence here than have the auditor write it for you. And a desk drowning in the repeatable stuff will eventually want the AI layer, which is the one part of Maxdesk that is neither free nor flat. The AI customer support agent rides on Elite at $99 a month, five thousand AI responses allowed inside of that, packs to buy past it. It triages, it drafts, and where its confidence is high it sends, holding everything else back for a human eye. Metered, plainly said, and disclosed here in the middle of a page about free, where it belongs.

Is it actually free forever, or free until you change your mind. Free forever, in the only sense either of us can hold anybody to, meaning the plan is the business model and not a promotion of it. The ads and the footer and the upgrade path above are how the lights stay on. A free plan with a visible income attached is a promise you can go and check up on, which is more than the word forever by its self ever gave anybody.

What is the catch, in one sentence. Four catches, not one, and they are the second section of this page rather than the bottom of it: ads your team sees, our name at the foot of your outgoing mail, three months of rolling history, and a ceiling on concurrent automations.

Do you cap tickets, or customers, or anything by volume. No. Conversations are not metered on any plan, and neither are the people answering them. The only metered thing anywhere in the product is the AI response allowance on Elite, and you will have read about that two sections ago.

What happens to the mail older than three months on free. It rolls off, the far end going quietly as the window moves, which is exactly why the paid plans exist for desks that need a longer memory. Keep your own copies if you are that sort. Your email management software still holds the original mail it always held, on account of us sitting on top of your address rather than instead of it, and the workspace can hand your data out to you rather than hold it hostage. That last sentence is a policy we are glad to be held to.

Forward your support address at the free workspace, add the two or three people who actually answer things, and let a normal week happen to it. No card goes in. No trial clock starts ticking. The worst case going is that you hand back a desk that cost you nothing and know your own requirements a good deal better than you did, and that is the whole of the risk.

Watch two things during the week, your own self, since they are the two this page cannot know for you. Whether three months of memory is enough for the way disputes come back at you. And whether the automation ceiling pinches before the month is out. The first answer tells you if free is your plan or your trial. The second tells you when $20 starts earning its keep, and either way the desk, the record and the unlimited logins are yours for as long as you care to keep them.