Free help desk software

Three kinds of free

• Open source, self-hosted. No licence fee; you pay in operations – updates, backups, mail delivery, and someone who understands all three.
• A free tier. No cost until you need the function that is one tier up. That is not a trick, it is the business model, but it is worth reading the tier list before starting.
• Ad-funded. Free because your attention is the product. Worth reading the terms carefully when the system holds customer conversations.

The cost that does not appear on an invoice

For self-hosted tools it is the afternoon every few months, and the version that stops being updated when the person who set it up leaves. A help desk holds every customer conversation you have, so an unpatched one is not a small risk.

For free tiers it is usually the migration you do a year later, having built habits around a tool you have outgrown.

When free is the right answer

When you have the operational capacity and want the control – then self-hosted open source is not a compromise, it is a preference, and a defensible one. And when you are testing whether you need a help desk at all, a free tier is a cheap way to find out.

What to check either way

• Can you export everything, in a readable format?
• Who applies security updates, and how would you know if nobody had?
• Where is the data, and is there a data processing agreement? See GDPR and your help desk.
• What is the price of the tier you will actually need in a year?