Zendesk releases a free plan

This isn't a "free plan", even if the cost is small and doesn't go to them. (It's $20/year to a charity, if you didn't RTFA.) Their own homepage calls it "Better than FREE", even which I find less misleading.

I appreciate the idea on the donation. Anything for a good cause.<p>It seems like the starter and regular plans are pretty anemic when it comes to services. For example, we are witholding proper security (SSL) until you pay more?!<p>Really, this is just designed to just push the customer into a higher paying plan. The service isn't really useful for most businesses until the Plus plan.<p>I'd rather that they just get rid of the starter and regular plans entirely. Two plans, Plus and Enterprise. Simple and would really make the comparison page really clean.<p>Just say buy the plus plan and we'll donate $20 to your choice of charity (and then name a few I can choose from, instead of just picking one). Effectively, that is what will happen anyway with the current system.

That's a fantastic idea. Hopefully they'll post a followup and let us know how it affected business.<p>At some point Square was donating 1 cent per transaction--but can't find anything about it on their website. Anyone know if they are still doing this?

There is a separate free plan for startups associated with ycombinator and other incubators. Details can be found here. <a href="http://www.zendesk.com/product/features/startups" rel="nofollow">http://www.zendesk.com/product/features/startups</a>

Atlassian does this with their software too. It's great to be able to start using their packages for a $10 donation each.

How about a plan that doesn't involve a 5x cost increase when you go from 3 to 4 users? Now that's something I'd upvote!