The Cost of Free Helpdesk Software

Why pay for helpdesk software? There is lots a good free software around. However, when it comes to a specialist piece of software that serves a critical element of your business, you should consider the true cost of “free helpdesk software”.

Our site often receives visitors who have been searching for “free helpdesk software”. Target Helpdesk Software provide “paid-for”, easy-to-use, enterprise-class software with full product support. Being “paid-for” enables us to continuously develop it, support it and provide a personal level of service to our clients.

If you are a one-person setup with just a handful of requests each month, then it is probably overkill to pay out for helpdesk software. In fact, in that situation, you may not even need free helpdesk software, and could quite easily manage with a spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet becomes cumbersome, you know you are ready for a proper request tracking solution like Target Helpdesk.

However, when you have a few people collaboratively working as part of a team and serving a client base where you need to monitor volume, performance, produce reports and analyse activity etc., then helpdesk software is required to manage those kinds of needs. If you choose free helpdesk software, you need to consider the true cost of that software. That is, how productive is it? Will it be working tomorrow and if it doesn’t who will fix it? Who will help you? It’s not just about the software itself needing maintenance, it’s about the constantly changing IT environment in which it exists; what happens if your server goes down and takes your helpdesk software with it? What happens when you move to a new operating system like Microsoft Vista, will it still work? If it is a hosted service, will it be available tomorrow? If it becomes unavailble, what’s happens to your data? How fast is the page-load on that web version. Is there a client-version for heavy duty workers, just like your Outlook desktop client?

Say you have an answer for all these questions, it goes without saying that a good commercial piece of software is continuously developed to meet ever changing requirements as well as ensure compliance with new hardware, software and regulations. That same good commercial software can only be sold if it can show a return-on-investment.

Let’s say you choose to use the free helpdesk software, you could easily find you spend an extra hour or so each week if not each day, manually compiling reports or performing your job slower, less efficiently than you might with an optimised solution, designed and professionally implemented and configured to suit your needs. Now lets say you have a team of people that are spending that extra unnecessary hour because they don’t really have the best tool for the job. If you have a team of 5, then that’s potentially costing you 5 hours per week. That’s almost a working day for some people after water-cooler chat 🙂 Roll that time up over the year and you and that software has almost cost you 7-working weeks.

You know what the average salary of your helpdesk techs are, so you can quickly work out the true cost of that free software. That’s not to mention the missed opportunity for improved service through a professional self-service web portal, automated inbound and outbound mail alerts to keep techs and clients up-to-date as needed. Not to mention the powerful reporting capabilities you will find in Target Helpdesk. From that, you can take as a rule-of-thumb, budgeting 1 to 2 months of a persons salary will very quickly give you a guaranteed return-on-investment above and beyond producivity improvements within a short space of time.

 At some point, we will offer a cut-down, subsidised version of our software. It will however be with an agenda to start those who do not currently have budget allocated or those who do not fully understand the value of the software. It will then serve a purpose to act as a gateway onto a full professional paid-for implementation of our flagship product, Target Helpdesk. If you wish to get a trial or more information about Target Helpdesk, then please let us know by contacting us here. We will provide you with a trial, you choose the evaluation period!