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Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt
- tyrelb 16y agoAlternatives: http://www.activecampaign.com/help-desk-software/ http://www.activecampaign.com/help-desk-software/ http://www.kayako.com/ http://www.kayako.com/ http://webhelpdesk.com/ http://webhelpdesk.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp http://tenderapp.com/ http://tenderapp.com/ http://www.cerberusweb.com/ http://www.cerberusweb.com/ http://www.thevisionworld.com/ http://www.thevisionworld.com/ http://www.autotask.com/software/service_desk.htm http://www.autotask.com/software/service_desk.htm
- drusenko 16y agoI'd also recommend HelpSpot -- has worked great for us!
- pclark 16y agoTender App is especially great
- chrisrhee 16y agoThanks! We're getting a bunch of signups right now. If anyone has questions about Tender, feel free to comment here, tweet @tenderapp, or email support@tenderapp.com — Will's girlfriend is in town visiting, so let's keep him as busy as possible!
- acangiano 16y agoThe pricing is just right too.
- koenbok 16y agoAnyone tried out http://www.assistly.com http://www.assistly.com yet?
- lanstein 16y agoAutotask only worked in IE as of a couple years ago. Avoid it like the plague.
- sjsivak 16y agoTo be fair, they are allowing customers to grandfather their pricing for a year: https://support.zendesk.com/entries/173169-new-grandfathering-terms https://support.zendesk.com/entries/173169-new-grandfatherin... However: > "As a result, the new pricing reflects the added business value of each individual plan." I read that entire post and I was unable to find the added business value, these features all seem like they should be part of the product not really premium stuff.
- jfager 16y agoThat grandfathering requires paying the year upfront, though.
- aarongough 16y agoThey said later in the comments that it is possible to pay quarterly and still receive the grandfathering...
- jfager 16y agoThey said "you can change your billing cycle to a quarterly cycle in order to extend grandfathering beyond July 1st billing cycle" - so one additional quarter, if you prepay for that quarter, followed by the increased prices. The only way you get current prices for another year is by prepaying by July 1.
- tghw 16y agoThat's not grandfathering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfathering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfathering), that's a grace period. Calling it grandfathering is one of the worst parts of this whole mess.
- kaiuhl 16y agoIf there's one thing I've learned from Apple, it's that innovation within a price point makes happy, comfortable customers. It's a scary precedent to set by saying that every new feature Zendesk adds, they're going to charge you for. Innovation should be the baseline.
- patio11 16y agoDo my eyes deceive me or are companies with 20 employees at their help desk complaining that a thousand bucks is a lot of money? I think we are seeing a later day MMORPG forum. At some point, it is easier to argue for a patch for your class than get 1 pct more stats, so you stop playing the game and start playing the boards. ZenDesk is the vendor most likely to drop prices by 1k for a single fauxraged posting, so start your keyboards.
- adamhowell 16y agoDo you really expect them not to complain when the month previous their bill was less than half of that?
- jonknee 16y agoIt could be 20 third-world employees. A client of mine uses ZenDesk and staffs it out of the Philippines. $1,000 is a ton of money in that regard especially when the hefty increase comes out of the blue. It's also straight users so if you have part time people it adds up quickly. Especially so when you factor in management that have accounts just to check up on staff. However I think the biggest thing is they didn't sign up for $1,000. They signed up for half that. Regardless of the figures no one likes seeing a 74% raise in cost.
- ekanes 16y agoRight. And there's nothing wrong with raising your price by a large amount, even if people are locked in with your product - you simply grandfather existing users. You accomplish what you want, and your existing users win too because all of a sudden they're getting a great deal. Nobody leaves. Nobody complains. Everyone's happy.
- mrkurt 16y agoRelative to what they were paying, a thousand bucks is a lot of money. It's also a lot of money relative to what other companies are charging for similar services. The definition of an "agent" is pretty vague for many places too. We, for instance, could probably have 40 "agents" handling help desk duties if we let our volunteer forum moderators help out with user support issues like I'd like to.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- robryan 16y agoThis seems to be a good example for the idea of setting your prices at the right level from very early on. Much better to err on the expensive side then drop them later than significant rises like these. Or initially offer a special deal so people know it will eventually cost more. Similar thing happens when going from freemium/ indirect revenue to charging. There was a big backlash when invision board did that, even though they could say there product was as good as the paid competition (Vbulletin). They had built a lot of their success on the back of a free product.
- krschultz 16y agoExactly. Anchor that price high, sell it low. Everyone at the old price will think they got a deal and "now its back to normal". Everyone coming in now won't know any better. If they didn't have sales at the old price, they wouldn't have anyway with the higher price anchor. There is never a reason to go too low early when you can just put that price up as a "discount" from the start.
- tghw 16y agoI don't think there is anything wrong with raising your prices. The main problem here is how they handled their existing user base. "Grandfathering" is not a short-term, temporary thing, what they're doing is a grace period. The right way to handle this would be to just let everyone who was on an old plan stay on those plans. Then, instead of a backlash, they'd be getting a sales bump as people who were on the fence signed up before the price change deadline.
- X-Istence 16y agoWell, the backslash against Invision Board was mainly because the main guy that was working on it had promised that the product would stay free forever, and suddenly he started charging for it. I have two licenses from 2005 and 2006 respectively and each one of them was fairly cheap compared to the $149.99 that it costs now, also I've got a perpetual license meaning I get free support, and free downloads of the latests versions for life, whereas the new ones are for 6 months of support, and for 6 months of new downloads, after that you are stuck on whatever version you happen to have purchased. $149.99 is pretty expensive for a piece of software, considering I can get an entire OS upgrade for $129 from Apple, which does MUCH more than a forum. I'll just keep my luck and my grandfathered accounts alive, knowing I am going to get the value I want out of those accounts.
- enntwo 16y agoRegardless of who's side you fall on, I think this is a pretty good example of why allowing public comments is a bit of a dangerous move. (Clearly the more dangerous move here was the price hike, but I do not know the internals of the company that led to the decision, or the interest that it was in, so I will not comment on that so much.) It is tough to imagine them recoverving from the sort of mob-rule that has formed in that comment thread, even if they restore current pricing plans. So much doubt was created amongst the users, which of course spread to twitter, here, and others, and you can see the discussion clearly degrade from concern to rage. Public interaction with users can be helpful to show a personal side of the company and try to show a strong effort for support/interaction, but do not forget that this risk exists. As with anything, use with caution.
- adamhowell 16y agoNot to mention it gives TechCrunch a permalink of juicy, pissed off comments to write a post about.
- hga 16y agoI'm not sure you're right. The backlash would be expressed elsewhere, here at least it's in a place they cannot afford to ignore. Their actions going forward, e.g. if they purge the posting with the links to competitors, will tell us a lot about them and how they're going to deal with this. Also note this could be part of an internal faction fight, one faction who's against this move may have wanted this so that they can show this immediate and detailed feedback from current customers to those in the company who put this in place. In general, I find most "supress information and communications" strategies to not work well, and this is ever more true the more we build our communications infrastructures. "The truth is out there" and pretending otherwise is likely to be futile.
- ahoyhere 16y agoWe allow public comments on our SaaS blog, but we don't use things like UserVoice for these reasons… If the issue is a minor annoyance, people will be minorly annoyed. They will probably write support; we'll handle it; they'll get personal service; everybody's happy. Until they see that other people have it too, and have the option to "vote it up," etc. That way, a minor annoyance a person would live with -- and be happy that you fixed -- becomes a major gripe. Basically, your customer's interaction should be with you, not other customers, unless other customers are part of the "features" of your product. Because other customers will misrepresent, inflame, etc., meanwhile the initial irritated customer will have his/her first interaction with a tool, not a human being. The moment they interact with a respectful person AT the company, they will calm down. Not so with a comment form. Basically, it's an argument that goes both ways :)
- uptown 16y agoIt seems like the are requiring the grandfathered customers to pre-pay a full year because maintaining two monthly pricing structures is more trouble to manage. But I'm curious what kind of blowback a company like this might face if existing customers were grandfathered into the old pricing plan for life. Would new customers resent existing customers? Without knowing Zendesk's financial situation, it's hard to know whether they're doing this out of necessity ... but it seems like the goodwill to the customers that made them what they are would be worth the trouble of managing two different pricing tiers.
- jonknee 16y agoIt seems like they could just create a new product/sku/whatever for each of the new pricing points and then stop selling the old products. You can't buy into the old subscription but it's no biggy to continue to bill it. The way they're doing it looks like a money grab (pay more now or pay up front for a year and then more later!).
- ahoyhere 16y agoI think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible. There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - since the form is the same - you will realize that they must know about that problem, for months even, and have never fixed it. We were paying $100/mo for ZenDesk around a year ago, and the price was fine. Theoretically good value for the money. But every one of my team hated it so much, they would never actually log in.
- jhancock 16y agoI need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.
- donw 16y agoWe're not quite ready for prime-time, but my startup (Mad Wombat) is developing a helpdesk application called Tracker, which might suit your needs, provided you don't mind us still being early in our beta. Tracker is a very tightly focused piece of software; it doesn't have public forums, or a wiki, or a knowledgebase. It just tracks problems, which can be submitted via email, via the web interface, or via the REST API. Now keep in mind, it's still early in our beta. The major features all work, but there are plenty of bugs, which we're fixing as fast as physics allows. Although we do use Tracker as our own customer support and bug-tracking application, so we've got a lot of motivation to make sure that it works. Shoot me an email if you're interested: don@madwombat.com
- troels 16y agoI don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.
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- boredguy8 16y agoI don't see why changing prices is a big deal. Apparently there's some pent-up frustration, but there is a real cost to keeping services online. If the price of electronic books doesn't increase over the next two years, I'll be astonished. And in fact, there's real danger to a business in terms of how they price their product. We were early adopters of RightNow, and we still pay an absurdly low price for their product (which we host) compared to other people, all because it's grandfathered in. Now this hurts them less because we host it, but you can imagine if they had to grandfather us in at the prices they were charging when they were new, it could really hurt them.
- ahoyhere 16y agoHere's why people are so angry: * they clearly didn't hear about it in advance * it was buried in the midst of discussing (minor) new features * it locked them out of features they had before (XML export) * it's a 2-3x increase for many people * the grandfathering option forces them to come up with thousands on short notice, or not at all * ZenDesk's blog managed to sound totally smug * nobody from ZenDesk is answering emails, phones, or even comments Basically, it's a nuclear disaster. EDIT: Fixed line break issue. I never remember...
- hga 16y agoI don't get the impression that they prepared their customer base for this. E.g. you know why you're paying "an absurdly low price" for RightNow and you should't be surprised if things change in an adverse way. E.g. I don't know anything about your and their situation, but say they grow so big they have to move to AWS and now providing service to you costs them cash money. You wouldn't be surprised if at the very least they passed that new cost of "goods" through to you.
- ahoyhere 16y agoAnybody here successfully raised prices without a major blowback? I'd love to hear how you did it (as opposed to these clowns).
- spolsky 16y agoEasy: Grandfather every existing customer, permanently.
- patio11 16y agoBonus points: if you tell them you're going to do it ahead of time, it gooses sales like crazy.
- ahoyhere 16y agoThat's not really an answer. If you're raising prices because of a profit issue, then you are prepared to lose some customers (the least profitable ones) so you can better serve the ones that give you a profit. Which is why I asked for strategies that worked, not "Don't."
- patio11 16y agoI'm thinking the marginal costs to providing this service, as well as the marginal costs for providing FogBugz (and many, many other SAAS apps asides), are so low as to be almost incalculable. Every customer is profitable almost by virtue of being there. Also, in a company which is growing rapidly, the average price per month paid at any plan level is going to quickly converge on your currently published price per month. That is another factor which suggests using Joel's solution, if you're growing.
- jfager 16y agoHow is that not an answer? Do you think ZenDesk has anywhere near saturated their market? Why should a company that's aiming to grow take the marketing hit that comes from pissing off their current customers? Why turn potential evangelists into angry detractors?
- Loic 16y agoYou can also think one step ahead. When you build your business around a SaaS offer, it is exactly like the old Microsoft way, you depend on the offer and you can be locked in. Surprisingly people get all excited by the new services with great API, nice teams behind them, bootstrapped, etc. but forget that when you do that you explicitly tell: "Yes provider XYZ, I accept to depend on you and to let you partially control my business.". This is why for my small bootstrapped project management/code hosting offer I propose a full daily backup and the software as GPL at the same time. That way my customers get the comfort of SaaS and the freedom of the GPL as they can migrate away without pain. I secured a couple of companies with 10+ active coders this way. They know they can download the software (which has an active community) and install it on their system if they want, when they want, for free. Finally a bit like what Wordpress is doing.
- mattmaroon 16y agoI don't understand why they're charging more per user as you scale. I don't know that I've ever seen a service like this. More typical would be $12 per mo per agent from 1-3. $10 from 4-20, etc. What's crazy is their service is considerably more expensive than hosted Exchange servers (which give you volume discounts, not increases) though Exchange probably costs a lot more to run. We use Zendesk and like it, but if we ever get to 20 or more support guys the business case for building our own ticketing system will be a slam dunk.
- patio11 16y agoI don't understand why they're charging more per user as you scale. Price discrimination between business types. An enterprise is not a collection of 1,200 one-man companies.
- mattmaroon 16y agoI don't know that there's much of a difference between a company with 3 support guys and one with 4. But regardless, like I mentioned, hosted exchange will service a fortune 500 company at a lower price per inbox than they will service my little group of 11.
- kschrader 16y agoSalesforce originated this model: http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp
- Osiris 16y agoI had been evaluating using ZenDesk for our new help desk. Does anyone use any other help desk products that are inexpensive (3 agents) and easy to use?
- nocman 16y agoIs it just me, or do they have a terrible home page (as far as telling you what their products do)? I had never heard of them before this post, and from the name my first thought was that it was some kind of computer desktop sharing service. I think I figured out from the HN posts that it is helpdesk software. I think that's a pretty major failure on their part.
- Uchikoma 16y agoMost customers won't leave - despite their whining. Customers stay based on value for them, the do not go based on the percentage of the increase.
- ryan-allen 16y agoZenDesk pricing has always confused me. They always pitched themselves as 'for the small smart guys' with all the 37s type philosophies that were popular at the time. And I looked at the product and thought "Wow, this product is actually quite nice!". But we had 5 staff and only one full time support person, but everyone needed an account. The starting price was a bit rich for how small we were and I met the head evangelist and told him I thought the pricing was a bit off. I said it was too much for the small guys, and not high enough for the big businesses who pay ridiculous amounts of money for software services (Joel Spolsky has a post on this somewhere...). His response was "Oh, you guys can have it for free for 6 months!", and I said "But then we'll be locked in, and have to pay heaps in 6 months time." We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit) and now we have a different set up of support users, we could justify the cost of ZenDesk given the current size and set up of the company but now we're locked in to eSupport! If they just had lower prices for the little guys they'd have got us. They're bloody mad, I tell you.
- th5 16y agoWeve been with esupport for about 1.5 years now. I find it somewhat cumbersome to do certain things, and there are 2 minor things that really piss me off, but overall, it being a piece of shit, sounds a little of an over statement. I wouldnt exactly rant and rave about it, but it seems to do its job and its not that expensive. Maybe im missing something...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- megamark16 16y ago"We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit)" Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers.
- ErrantX 16y agoDo you really think so? It always struck me that there was 1001 support desk providers out there... is there really that much space? (cos if so it's going on my list of maybe projects :))
- mhp 16y agoWhy don't they change the price for new users, and leave the price for existing customers? Seems like the default way to increase your prices with minimal friction.
- danielha 16y agoWe used Zendesk over a year ago with about 4-5 agent accounts. We cancelled it because no one wanted to log into it and we were having a lot of support issues. Fast forward some time and we start up an account again because our support definitely grew beyond a shared support Gmail interface. We're still using it now but we're also using Assistly.com in tandem. Assistly is in beta but there are great guys behind it and they listen very closely to product feedback. I absolutely expect a full transition from Zendesk in the near future.
- titel 16y agoUnfortunately this kind of moves from different companies affect the entire SaaS space. There has always been a degree of uncertainty when committing your business to one service like this... what if they increase the prices? what if they will close? what if they turn bad and close my data behind a payed wall? will they be able to keep the service up most of the time (just think of the time when Gmail went down..)? And so on... This is only going to make this worries a bigger issue when choosing to commit to one of these services.
- motters 16y agoSounds like the dot com business model all over again.
- srw 16y agoWhy not use OTRS ? http://otrs.org/ http://otrs.org/
- stumpy124 16y agoUseful link for HelpSpot (or other self hosted help desk software) vs Zendesk http://www.helpspot.com/helpspot-vs-zendesk/ http://www.helpspot.com/helpspot-vs-zendesk/