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!
What is stopping me from totally abusing Help Scout customers now, just by having an AI write 1000s of legitimate looking questions to a bunch of Help Scout users?
A competitor might do this, for example, to cause harm.
Help Scout claims a "Fair Billing Policy... to keep your monthly bill predictable, Help Scout determines your contact tier based on your trailing three-month average" [of # of contacts].
So then fine, it's a long game. I send you 1000 AI generated requests for 3 months. If you reply to all of them (and if you don't, you're ignoring some legitimate customers), now your Help Scout cost is $545. Hell, if you have the AI addon, it's replying to my AI tripe with more AI rubbish and picking your pocket for the privilege. *
"As a result, Help Scout’s pricing is 34% less variable than per-seat billing" is of course a crock of bullshit when you only ever have 1 seat.
What the hell is even the benefit of Help Scout, other than "AI" and I guess some kind of ticket system or something. A long time ago (~20 years) I sold a shareware Mac OS X product with a friend that was fairly popular (got a small printed Macworld blurb) and e-mail was just fine, and also free.
* For the record I am not advocating anyone do this, but I feel that it must be pointed out, and with enough detail so that one can clearly understand how ridiculous and abusable Help Scout's pricing is now.
