Whither Help Scout?
Over the past few weeks, many Help Scout customers have received notice that our plans will change to a new pricing model. Customers who haven’t received notice yet probably will soon. The new system is based on a rolling average of customer interactions. As they cleverly frame it: “the number of contacts you help each month.” Once notified, customers are granted six-months notice before the changes take effect.
The problem, for most Help Scout customers, is that the new system increases their monthly costs. A little for some, and a whole lot for others. The closest approximation to my current $22/month plan starts at $50/month and covers an average of 100 customer interactions per month. They’re obviously sensitive to the sticker shock this will produce, so they’re offering a two-year “Loyalty Discount” of about $20/month, reducing my monthly cost to $28.60/month. That’s still a 30% rise, but coming out to $6, it’s something I can live with.
For larger customers, the cost increase could be much worse. Imagine my company employed a three-person support team, handling customer interactions for 500 unique customers per month. Under current Help Scout pricing, I would pay $66/month. Exactly three times the amount I pay today. But under the new pricing structure, the minimum cost is $266/month.
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[The] big problem with the free tier is that it removes access to the Help Scout API, and the ability to “Export” your data. Restricting data export is very 2005, and I wonder how it will play out in Europe.
I agree that pricing based on the number of customers helped is not a very attractive model, primarily because it isn’t very predictable. Even the old model of $22/month seems like a lot for e-mailing his average of 43 customers per month. My support load, even in a month without a big release, is several times that. Yet they don’t even quote plans with more than 100 contacts per month. This seems strange. For a small company, I don’t really see what value this is really adding, unless the AI tools are amazing.
Previously:
- A Few Words About Indie App Business
- The Enshittification of All Things
- Bug Tracking and Customer Support Tools
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Their pricing drove us to Freescout (a great free open-source clone with optional lifetime low-price add-ons.) Glad before, and even more glad now that we switched!
