Five agents on a $19-a-seat plan cost $3,420 over three years. Twenty agents cost $13,680. Running a help desk yourself comes to about $6,600 over the same period whether you have five agents or twenty. So below roughly ten agents the paid plan is cheaper, and above that self-hosting is. If your team is small, "free" probably isn't the money-saving move it sounds like.
"Free" covers four different things, and they don't cost the same.
Four kinds of free
| Kind | What you pay | What breaks first |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted free tier | Limits | A cap on agents, history, channels or automation |
| Free trial | Time, then money | The trial ends with your tickets already inside |
| Shared inbox | Attention | Two people answer one message, or nobody knows what's overdue |
| Open source you host | A server and your hours | Updates, backups, email delivery |
A trial isn't a free plan, though plenty of lists treat it as one. Zendesk's pricing page offers a 14-day trial and no permanent free plan. Freshdesk's does the same. You'll see claims online that Freshdesk has a free tier for one or two agents, and that doesn't match its current pricing page, so look at your own account before you build on it.
Other vendors change their caps often, and old numbers get repeated for years. Read the limits on the vendor's own page the day you decide.
What open source "free" means
Open source help desks have no licence fee. FreeScout states that agents, tickets and mailboxes are unlimited. osTicket, Libredesk and Escalated don't put a cap on agents either.
| Project | Licence |
|---|---|
| FreeScout | AGPL-3.0 |
| osTicket | GPL-2.0 |
| Libredesk | AGPL-3.0 |
| Escalated | MIT |
No fee still means work. Someone installs it, applies updates, keeps backups, and makes sure email arrives. That work is what the next section prices.
Three years at 5 and 20 agents
The hosted price is the Zendesk Support Team or Freshdesk Growth plan, both $19 per agent per month billed annually. For self-hosting I've assumed a $20 a month server, 10 hours of setup, and 3 hours of upkeep a month, with an hour worth $50. Change those to your own.
Hosted, $19 per agent per month, 3 years
5 agents 19 x 5 x 12 x 3 = $3,420
20 agents 19 x 20 x 12 x 3 = $13,680
Self-hosted standalone help desk, 3 years
Year 1 server 240 + setup (10 h x 50) 500 + upkeep (36 h x 50) 1,800 = $2,540
Year 2 server 240 + upkeep 1,800 = $2,040
Year 3 server 240 + upkeep 1,800 = $2,040
Total = $6,620
Break-even: 19 x n x 36 = 6,620, so n is about 9.7 agents
At five agents, the hosted plan wins by about $3,200. At twenty, self-hosting costs roughly half. The break-even sits near ten agents, and it holds only if upkeep doesn't grow as the team does.
The hourly rate moves it a lot. At $100 an hour the self-hosted total becomes $12,520 and the break-even jumps to about 18 agents. At $25 an hour it drops to $3,670 and about 5 agents.
If the help desk lives inside an application you already run, most of the setup block disappears. You already pay for the server, the database and the sign-in. What's left is the install and the upkeep, which for a developer who ships the app is a few hours, not a new system to operate.
Before you pick a free plan
- Find the cap in numbers: agents, tickets a month, history length, channels, automation rules, attachments.
- Find the price of the first paid step. A jump from $0 to $19 a seat is manageable. A jump to "contact sales" isn't.
- Make sure you can export everything (tickets, customers, replies, attachments) through a file or an API. If you can't leave, it isn't free.
- Test email. A reply should land on the right ticket, and outbound mail should reach inboxes. Our email ticketing guide covers the mechanics.
- Check that customers can reply without making an account.
- Find out whether your own domain and branding are behind a paywall.
- For anything you host, look at recent releases and how security fixes get announced.
When not to bother
If you get a few requests a week, a shared inbox is enough and a help desk is just overhead. If nobody on your team can run a server and you need support at weekends, pay for a hosted plan. If you work in a regulated field and need vendor-signed compliance documents, same answer.
Where Escalated fits
Escalated isn't free in the way a hosted tier is. It's an MIT-licensed package that installs inside an application you already run, with no per-agent fees, and a developer has to install it. You add the package for your framework, it creates its tables in your database, and you register its routes. There are versions for Laravel, Rails, Django, AdonisJS, Symfony, NestJS, Phoenix, Go, .NET, Spring and WordPress.
It makes sense when you already run one of those and want tickets next to your customers and orders, using your sign-in. It makes no sense if you have no application to put it in, and it isn't an IT service management tool. In those cases a standalone help desk gets you running faster. For hosted products side by side, see the comparison page. For the wider field of open source options, see open source ticketing systems.
FAQ
What's the best free help desk software? For a very small team, a shared inbox or a hosted free tier. For a team with more than about ten agents and someone who can run a server, open source is usually cheaper over three years.
Is there a free help desk with unlimited agents? FreeScout states no agent cap, and Escalated has no per-agent fees. You pay for hosting and your own time.
What's the catch with free help desk software? A cap that forces an upgrade as you grow, the time you spend running it, or your data sitting on someone else's servers.
Is osTicket really free? The licence is free (GPL-2.0). You still need a server with PHP and MySQL, and time to install and update it.
What happens when I outgrow a free plan? You pay the first paid tier or you move. Moving is only practical if you can export your tickets, which is why that's item three on the list above.
Prices and requirements as of November 2026.