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, labeled 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 favor 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 center, 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.
Try the Helpora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.