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I remember when Bushido made the front-page of HN a few months ago (search for details). I was pretty pumped then and am even more so now. One thing that's bee

I remember when Bushido made the front-page of HN a few months ago (search for details). I was pretty pumped then and am even more so now. One thing that's been on my mind lately is help desk software. The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?) [1], especially when it's best for everyone at a startup to wear the support hat now and then. Not to mention the fact that some lock in your data. We once used a home-built ticket system for support (a Rails 2.3.x app that's available at https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help). I'm seriously considering re-writing this app in Rails 3.1 and putting it up on Bushido. The biggest feature request I've seen is the ability to handle incoming emails as tickets, and that's now easy with MailGun or SendGrid. All that to say I think Bushido could really disrupt some industries (even recent ones) that are over-priced or handcuff customers with arbitrary limits. --- [1] http://uservoice.com/plans http://uservoice.com/plans http://www.zendesk.com/signup http://www.zendesk.com/signup http://www.assistly.com/pricing http://www.assistly.com/pricing http://www.freshdesk.com/pricing.html http://www.freshdesk.com/pricing.html

sgrove 15y ago
Hey Erik, awesome note! We actually have some crazy-awesome api's for handling incoming emails - each app has a default email address provisioned for it, and an app can add/remove email accounts programmatically. And handling incoming email is done through a very cool hook system we're really excited to share soon. Each app that's deployed has a bunch of resources automatically provisioned for it, so as a developer, you never have to wonder if something's present - the goal is to make the developer omnipotent, so you can do whatever you're thinking of, without thinking about it too much :) Feel free to shoot me an email at s@gobushido.com, we'd really love to talk to you about the help-desk app (even we're looking for a good one)! Edit: Forgot to add: the incoming/outgoing email stuff is powered by Mailgun actually - those guys are so awesome. With the wrapper we add though, and because we're very language-focused right now, we can make the api's a joy to use, beyond what even they're able to do currently.
pwim 15y ago
The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?) I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their salary.
- kalid 15y ago
  Exactly. Does the app save an hour of an agent's time/sanity per month? If so, it's worth it.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- callmeed 15y ago
  That's the problem. Even small startups use them. Imagine a 4-person startup with 2 co-founders, another engineer and another designer. No full-time support staff, so everyone jumps in from time to time. Unless you make a generic agent account (which is lame for assignment/follow-up), you're talking $100/mo for support. I don't discount the value extracted but to me it reeks of enterprise, per-seat licensing a bit. I just think an OS, unlimited agent option would be nice for small startups.
  - sgrove 15y ago
    Just as an additional anecdote, I've heard this sentiment repeated just about everywhere in SF, especially where companies try to involve developers in support in a rotating fashion. Like I said, definitely contact me, I think there could be something very interesting for everyone here :)
  - wheels 15y ago
    As someone who sits on the other side of that equation, $9/month basically translates to "1 support request per month". I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say, 0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden your profit evaporates. It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this: Support Person Salary $60,000.00 Fully Loaded Employee Cost $90,000.00 Per Hour $46.88 Support Requests / Hour 6 Cost / Request $7.81 That's actually why we removed our $9/month plan. It was just hard to get excited about helping someone out when you realized after the first mail you were going into the hole for such. The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather than based on some metric of an "average customer".
prateekdayal 15y ago
I think pricing by logins for a support tool is just dumb and prevents you from delivering great customer support. That's why we are working on SupportBee - http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-for-a-support-tool-is-nuts/ http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-...
- sgrove 15y ago
  Hey Prateek, fancy seeing you here :) We should catch up again soon, I'd love to see how SupportBee is coming along!
  - prateekdayal 15y ago
    Sure! Congratulations on the launch. As I said in the call, I think Bushido is one of the most imaginative tech products I have checked out lately.
- Zakuzaa 15y ago
  I don't find it dumb. Just a different pricing strategy.

sgrove 15y ago

Hey Erik, awesome note! We actually have some crazy-awesome api's for handling incoming emails - each app has a default email address provisioned for it, and an app can add/remove email accounts programmatically. And handling incoming email is done through a very cool hook system we're really excited to share soon. Each app that's deployed has a bunch of resources automatically provisioned for it, so as a developer, you never have to wonder if something's present - the goal is to make the developer omnipotent, so you can do whatever you're thinking of, without thinking about it too much :) Feel free to shoot me an email at s@gobushido.com, we'd really love to talk to you about the help-desk app (even we're looking for a good one)! Edit: Forgot to add: the incoming/outgoing email stuff is powered by Mailgun actually - those guys are so awesome. With the wrapper we add though, and because we're very language-focused right now, we can make the api's a joy to use, beyond what even they're able to do currently.

pwim 15y ago

The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?) I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their salary.

kalid 15y ago
Exactly. Does the app save an hour of an agent's time/sanity per month? If so, it's worth it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
callmeed 15y ago
That's the problem. Even small startups use them. Imagine a 4-person startup with 2 co-founders, another engineer and another designer. No full-time support staff, so everyone jumps in from time to time. Unless you make a generic agent account (which is lame for assignment/follow-up), you're talking $100/mo for support. I don't discount the value extracted but to me it reeks of enterprise, per-seat licensing a bit. I just think an OS, unlimited agent option would be nice for small startups.
- sgrove 15y ago
  Just as an additional anecdote, I've heard this sentiment repeated just about everywhere in SF, especially where companies try to involve developers in support in a rotating fashion. Like I said, definitely contact me, I think there could be something very interesting for everyone here :)
- wheels 15y ago
  As someone who sits on the other side of that equation, $9/month basically translates to "1 support request per month". I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say, 0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden your profit evaporates. It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this: Support Person Salary $60,000.00 Fully Loaded Employee Cost $90,000.00 Per Hour $46.88 Support Requests / Hour 6 Cost / Request $7.81 That's actually why we removed our $9/month plan. It was just hard to get excited about helping someone out when you realized after the first mail you were going into the hole for such. The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather than based on some metric of an "average customer".

prateekdayal 15y ago

I think pricing by logins for a support tool is just dumb and prevents you from delivering great customer support. That's why we are working on SupportBee - http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-for-a-support-tool-is-nuts/ http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-...

sgrove 15y ago
Hey Prateek, fancy seeing you here :) We should catch up again soon, I'd love to see how SupportBee is coming along!
- prateekdayal 15y ago
  Sure! Congratulations on the launch. As I said in the call, I think Bushido is one of the most imaginative tech products I have checked out lately.
Zakuzaa 15y ago
I don't find it dumb. Just a different pricing strategy.