ZenDesk pricing has always confused me. They always pitched themselves as 'for the small smart guys' with all the 37s type philosophies that were popular at the time.<p>And I looked at the product and thought "Wow, this product is actually quite nice!".<p>But we had 5 staff and only one full time support person, but everyone needed an account. The starting price was a bit rich for how small we were and I met the head evangelist and told him I thought the pricing was a bit off.<p>I said it was too much for the small guys, and not high enough for the big businesses who pay ridiculous amounts of money for software services (Joel Spolsky has a post on this somewhere...).<p>His response was "Oh, you guys can have it for free for 6 months!", and I said "But then we'll be locked in, and have to pay heaps in 6 months time."<p>We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit) and now we have a different set up of support users, we could justify the cost of ZenDesk given the current size and set up of the company but now we're locked in to eSupport!<p>If they just had lower prices for the little guys they'd have got us. They're bloody mad, I tell you.
Regardless of who's side you fall on, I think this is a pretty good example of why allowing public comments is a bit of a dangerous move.<p>(Clearly the more dangerous move here was the price hike, but I do not know the internals of the company that led to the decision, or the interest that it was in, so I will not comment on that so much.)<p>It is tough to imagine them recoverving from the sort of mob-rule that has formed in that comment thread, even if they restore current pricing plans. So much doubt was created amongst the users, which of course spread to twitter, here, and others, and you can see the discussion clearly degrade from concern to rage.<p>Public interaction with users can be helpful to show a personal side of the company and try to show a strong effort for support/interaction, but do not forget that this risk exists. As with anything, use with caution.
Do my eyes deceive me or are companies with 20 employees <i>at their help desk</i> complaining that a thousand bucks is a lot of money?<p>I think we are seeing a later day MMORPG forum. At some point, it is easier to argue for a patch for your class than get 1 pct more stats, so you stop playing the game and start playing the boards. ZenDesk is the vendor most likely to drop prices by 1k for a single fauxraged posting, so start your keyboards.
If there's one thing I've learned from Apple, it's that innovation within a price point makes happy, comfortable customers.<p>It's a scary precedent to set by saying that every new feature Zendesk adds, they're going to charge you for. Innovation should be the baseline.
This seems to be a good example for the idea of setting your prices at the right level from very early on. Much better to err on the expensive side then drop them later than significant rises like these. Or initially offer a special deal so people know it will eventually cost more.<p>Similar thing happens when going from freemium/ indirect revenue to charging. There was a big backlash when invision board did that, even though they could say there product was as good as the paid competition (Vbulletin). They had built a lot of their success on the back of a free product.
I don't understand why they're charging more per user as you scale. I don't know that I've ever seen a service like this.<p>More typical would be $12 per mo per agent from 1-3. $10 from 4-20, etc.<p>What's crazy is their service is considerably more expensive than hosted Exchange servers (which give you volume discounts, not increases) though Exchange probably costs a lot more to run. We use Zendesk and like it, but if we ever get to 20 or more support guys the business case for building our own ticketing system will be a slam dunk.
We used Zendesk over a year ago with about 4-5 agent accounts. We cancelled it because no one wanted to log into it and we were having a lot of support issues. Fast forward some time and we start up an account again because our support definitely grew beyond a shared support Gmail interface.<p>We're still using it now but we're also using Assistly.com in tandem. Assistly is in beta but there are great guys behind it and they listen very closely to product feedback. I absolutely expect a full transition from Zendesk in the near future.
Is it just me, or do they have a terrible home page (as far as telling you what their products do)? I had never heard of them before this post, and from the name my first thought was that it was some kind of computer desktop sharing service. I think I figured out from the HN posts that it is helpdesk software. I think that's a pretty major failure on their part.
You can also think one step ahead. When you build your business around a SaaS offer, it is exactly like the old Microsoft way, you depend on the offer and you can be locked in.<p>Surprisingly people get all excited by the new services with great API, nice teams behind them, bootstrapped, etc. but forget that when you do that you explicitly tell: "Yes provider XYZ, I accept to depend on you and to let you partially control my business.".<p>This is why for my small bootstrapped project management/code hosting offer I propose a full daily backup and the software as GPL at the same time.<p>That way my customers get the comfort of SaaS and the freedom of the GPL as they can migrate away without pain. I secured a couple of companies with 10+ active coders this way. They know they can download the software (which has an active community) and install it on their system if they want, when they want, for free. Finally a bit like what Wordpress is doing.
To be fair, they are allowing customers to grandfather their pricing for a year: <a href="https://support.zendesk.com/entries/173169-new-grandfathering-terms" rel="nofollow">https://support.zendesk.com/entries/173169-new-grandfatherin...</a><p>However:<p>> "As a result, the new pricing reflects the added business value of each individual plan."<p>I read that entire post and I was unable to find the added business value, these features all seem like they should be part of the product not really premium stuff.
I don't see why changing prices is a big deal. Apparently there's some pent-up frustration, but there is a real cost to keeping services online. If the price of electronic books doesn't increase over the next two years, I'll be astonished.<p>And in fact, there's real danger to a business in terms of how they price their product. We were early adopters of RightNow, and we still pay an absurdly low price for their product (which we host) compared to other people, all because it's grandfathered in. Now this hurts them less because we host it, but you can imagine if they had to grandfather us in at the prices they were charging when they were new, it could really hurt them.
It seems like the are requiring the grandfathered customers to pre-pay a full year because maintaining two monthly pricing structures is more trouble to manage.<p>But I'm curious what kind of blowback a company like this might face if existing customers were grandfathered into the old pricing plan for life. Would new customers resent existing customers? Without knowing Zendesk's financial situation, it's hard to know whether they're doing this out of necessity ... but it seems like the goodwill to the customers that made them what they are would be worth the trouble of managing two different pricing tiers.
Unfortunately this kind of moves from different companies affect the entire SaaS space.<p>There has always been a degree of uncertainty when committing your business to one service like this... what if they increase the prices? what if they will close? what if they turn bad and close my data behind a payed wall? will they be able to keep the service up most of the time (just think of the time when Gmail went down..)? And so on...<p>This is only going to make this worries a bigger issue when choosing to commit to one of these services.
Useful link for HelpSpot (or other self hosted help desk software) vs Zendesk <a href="http://www.helpspot.com/helpspot-vs-zendesk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.helpspot.com/helpspot-vs-zendesk/</a>
Why don't they change the price for new users, and leave the price for existing customers? Seems like the default way to increase your prices with minimal friction.
I had been evaluating using ZenDesk for our new help desk. Does anyone use any other help desk products that are inexpensive (3 agents) and easy to use?
I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible.<p>There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - since the form is the same - you will realize that they must know about that problem, for months even, and have never fixed it.<p>We were paying $100/mo for ZenDesk around a year ago, and the price was fine. Theoretically good value for the money. But every one of my team hated it so much, they would never actually log in.