Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, ServiceNow and Gorgias rent the queue. The systems we deploy instead are Zammad and FreeScout, both AGPL-3.0, and osTicket, which is GPL-2.0. The ticket, the customer, and the history sit on a host the client controls.
What moves, and what does not?
Mail-in, a shared inbox, assignment, and a customer history move. Intercom's outbound product tours and Gorgias's store-specific automations do not come along. Those are product features, not a data model, and copying them means building them.
What does a self-hosted helpdesk still cost?
A host, patches, backups, and someone who notices when mail delivery fails. The per-agent fee goes away. The operator does not. Leave the operator out and the queue goes quiet for the wrong reason.
When should the helpdesk stay rented?
When the team is tiny, the volume is low, and nobody wants a mail server in their life. A five-person inbox on a rented desk can be the cheaper answer. We say so.
What do we hand over?
We select the system, deploy it on infrastructure you control, connect it to the tools you keep, and write the runbook so your own team can operate it. Support after handover is optional. The rest of the map is in software you can stop renting; the engagement behind it is open-source business systems.
Name one process that still needs a person. We will tell you what a one-time build takes.
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