Helpdesk and support inbox
What it costs to self-host FreeScout
FreeScout — Free self-hosted omnichannel AI-powered helpdesk & shared mailbox Below is the server it needs at each team size, what that costs, and how long the 3 commercial products it replaces would take to cost more.
| Team size | Memory | Disk | Cheapest plan that fits | Server | With backups and your time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | 1.3 GB | 10.3 GB | CX23 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $6.70 | $45.54 |
| 5 people | 1.3 GB | 11.5 GB | CX23 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $6.70 | $45.54 |
| 10 people | 1.4 GB | 13 GB | CX23 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $6.70 | $45.54 |
| 25 people | 1.5 GB | 17.5 GB | CX23 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $6.70 | $45.54 |
| 50 people | 1.7 GB | 25 GB | CX23 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $6.70 | $45.54 |
| 100 people | 2.2 GB | 40 GB | CX23 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $6.70 | $45.54 |
| 250 people | 3.7 GB | 85 GB | CX43 (cost-optimized) · Hetzner Cloud | $18.46 | $59.65 |
The sizing model for FreeScout
Laravel and MySQL. A shared mailbox rather than a full support suite, which is exactly what most small teams are overpaying Zendesk for.
- 1 GB of memory for the whole stack at rest, every container the project ships included.
- 8 MB more per active user, then 25% on top so the box is not running at its ceiling.
- 10 GB of disk to begin with, growing 0.3 GB per user.
- 1 vCPU. Carried through from the project's baseline and not scaled with team size, because for this workload memory is what runs out first.
The base figures are our estimate, derived from the services in the project's reference Docker Compose file, because it does not publish a minimum specification we could cite. The per-user increments are ours in every case. They are deliberately generous rather than optimistic: a comparison that undersizes the server flatters self-hosting.
Time, not just money
FreeScout is rated easy to operate, which in this model means about 2 hours to get it running properly the first time and 0.5 hours a month after that. At $75 an hour that is $150 once and $37.50 a month, which is usually the largest line in the whole calculation. This one is about as light as self-hosting gets: a single container and little to do beyond keeping the image current.
What it replaces
| Commercial product | Its cost at 10 people | FreeScout at 10 people | Break-even | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk Suite Team | $616 | $45.54 | under a month | full breakdown |
| Help Scout Standard | $300 | $45.54 | under a month | full breakdown |
| Freshdesk Growth | $190 | $45.54 | about a month | full breakdown |
Where to put FreeScout
1.4 GB of memory and 13 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the CX23 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud for $6.70 a month.
Go to Hetzner Cloud Compare hosts
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and may well undercut it. Price them yourself before you commit.
Project facts
| Licence | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | PHP |
| GitHub stars | 4,532 |
| Open issues | 24 |
| Latest release | 1.8.240 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Repository checked | 2026-09-12 |
| Project | freescout.net · freescout-help-desk/freescout |
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