Helpdesk and support inbox · cost comparison
Zendesk vs self-hosted FreeScout: what each actually costs
Zendesk on the Suite Team tier against FreeScout running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
At 10 people, self-hosting FreeScout costs $49.50 a month against $638 for Zendesk. You are ahead after under a month and $21,020 better off over 36 months, with your own time already priced in.
- Zendesk
- $638per month, Suite Team
- Self-hosted
- $49.50server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $12.00Starter 2 GB, 2 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $21,020 saved by self-hosting
- Break-even
- under a monthafter $150 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Zendesk | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $63.76 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$363 |
| 5 people | $319 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$9,544 |
| 10 people | $638 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$21,020 |
| 25 people | $1,594 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$55,448 |
| 50 people | $3,188 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$112,829 |
| 100 people | $6,376 | $63.90 | $26.40 | Starter 4 GB (4 GB) | +$227,071 |
| 250 people | $15,939 | $84.30 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | +$570,619 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around solo.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $10.00 | Starter 2 GB at VPSServer: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB disk |
| Backups | $2.00 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $37.50 | 0.5 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $49.50 | Plus $150 once, for roughly 2 hours of first-time setup |
Zendesk at this size costs $638 a month. 10 seats at $63.76 each. This is the annually-billed rate, which is what the vendor's page displayed; paying monthly costs more. The vendor quoted EUR, converted at the dated rate on the methodology page.
What FreeScout needs to run at 10 people
Laravel and MySQL. A shared mailbox rather than a full support suite, which is exactly what most small teams are overpaying Zendesk for.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 1.4 GB | 1 GB for the stack at rest, plus 8 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 13 GB | 10 GB base, plus 0.3 GB per user |
| vCPU | 1 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
These base figures are an estimate. FreeScout does not publish a minimum specification we could cite, so the base memory and disk are derived from the services in its own reference Docker Compose file. Treat them as a starting point and watch the first week of metrics.
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Zendesk has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $2.00 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- FreeScout is a light lift: one container and no scheduled work beyond image updates. That is why the maintenance line is 0.5 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. FreeScout covers the core of what teams use Zendesk for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
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 Starter 2 GB at VPSServer for $10.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The VPSServer link above is an affiliate link, run through the same programme as our Kamatera link; VPSServer and Kamatera belong to the same group. If you sign up through it we may earn a commission, but the programme does not state an amount for VPSServer. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
FreeScout at a glance
| Licence | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | PHP |
| GitHub stars | 4,532, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | 1.8.240 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | freescout.net · freescout-help-desk/freescout |
Get the migration checklist for this tool
A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk Suite Team | EUR 55.00 per seat per month | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-12 |
| VPSServer Starter 2 GB | $10.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-21 |
| Exchange rate | 1 EUR = 1.1592 USD | Frankfurter, European Central Bank reference rates | 2026-09-11 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| FreeScout sizing | 1 GB base, 8 MB per user | derived from its reference Compose stack | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-12, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.