Renting a help desk, or owning one: what three seats cost over five years
Help Scout, Zendesk and Freshdesk all meter the people who answer, not the questions asked. Priced against Helpora at $69 once, with every vendor figure read at the vendor and dated.
Three people answer internal requests at most small companies. Not a support department — three
people who also do other things, and who between them are the reason a laptop request does not sit
unread for a week.
Every hosted desk on the market prices that arrangement the same way: **by the people, monthly,
forever.** Here is what the three obvious choices ask for, read from their own pricing pages.
What the vendors publish
Help Scout — Standard $25 per user/mo, Plus $45, Pro
$75, with annual billing shown as "-16%". Read 2026-09-03; the page said, verbatim:
*"standard $25 per user/mo … $45 per user/mo … pro $75 per user/mo … add-on $0.75/resolution …
additional inboxes $10/mo"*. For a three-person desk on Standard that is $75 a month.
The add-on line is the one worth reading twice. The AI assistant is billed per resolution, and
each extra inbox is billed by the month — so the bill grows with the work as well as with the team.
Two meters, not one.
Zendesk — Suite Team $55 per agent/month paid yearly,
Suite Professional $115, Support Team $19, Enterprise quote-gated. Read 2026-08-22. Three agents on
Suite Team is $165 a month. Zendesk meters per agent and the ladder from $19 to $115 is how much
of the product each agent is allowed to touch.
Freshdesk — read 2026-08-22, three agents come to
$57 a month. Same shape: the bill tracks the size of the team rather than the size of the queue.
The arithmetic, labelled as arithmetic
Nothing below is a projection. It is the published monthly figure multiplied by sixty months, which
is the only honest thing you can do with a subscription price.
| monthly, 3 seats | five years | |
|---|---|---|
| Zendesk Suite Team | $165 | $9,900 |
| Help Scout Standard | $75 | $4,500 |
| Freshdesk | $57 | $3,420 |
| Helpora | — | $69, once |
The five-year column assumes the price never rises and you never add a fourth person. Both
assumptions favour the subscription.
What Helpora actually does
It answers one question and refuses the rest: how long until a person actually replied? The
first-response clock is stamped by the first message that genuinely goes to the requester, under a
database guard, so two agents replying in the same second cannot both claim it — and nothing else
touches it. No note, no reassignment, no status change, no reopening.
It also refuses to let a request be closed in silence: resolving or closing one that has never had
an outbound message is blocked outright, because a desk that can close without answering will, and
its numbers will look excellent.
Who should stay where they are
Stay with Help Scout if you answer customers at volume and want the knowledge base, the AI
assistant and the Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot integrations. Stay with Zendesk if you serve
customers rather than colleagues — a public help centre, branded portals, chat, phone. **Stay with
Freshdesk** if you need a customer-facing portal, chat and phone in one product.
Helpora has none of that, and this guide is not going to pretend otherwise. It is an internal desk
that measures one thing honestly.
The two links this guide owes you
Helpora is $69, once, with the PHP source and no per-seat anything.
Open the demo first — it is the same application, seeded with data, and it does not
ask for an email address.