In short
“Free” helpdesk software comes in very different shapes. Before you migrate your team, check five things: is there a time limit, an agent or contact cap, which features are locked, whether a credit card is required, and where it’s hosted. Those five answers decide whether “free” actually lasts.
Search for a free helpdesk and you’ll get dozens of results - all labelled “free,” almost none of them meaning the same thing. Some are genuinely free forever. Some are 14-day trials with a countdown. Some are freemium plans stripped down to email-only. And some are open-source tools that are free to download but not free to run.
Picking the wrong one is expensive in a way that doesn’t show up until later: you migrate agents, import history, train your team, connect your inbox - and then the plan expires, or you hit a cap, or the one feature you actually needed turns out to be paid. Here’s how to tell the difference up front.
The four flavours of “free”
Almost every “free” helpdesk falls into one of these:
- Free trial. Full product for a fixed window (often 14 or 21 days), then it’s paid. Great for evaluating - not a home for your support desk.
- Time-limited free plan. Looks like a free plan, but converts to paid after a set period. A recent example: a major vendor’s free tier now covers only 1–2 agents for the first six months.
- Freemium (free forever, but thin). Free with no time limit, but the useful features - SLAs, reporting, automation, SSO - sit behind paid tiers, or a hard cap (say, 100 contacts a month) throttles real use.
- Open-source. The software is free; the server, updates, security and uptime are your job. Free as in “free puppy.”
The five checks that matter
| Check | Why it bites you later |
|---|---|
| Time limit | A free plan that expires means a forced migration or a bill, right after you’ve committed your team. |
| Agent & contact caps | A 2-agent or 100-contact ceiling is fine for a demo and useless for a real desk. Know the number before you invite people. |
| Which features are free | SLAs, reporting and automation are what make a helpdesk more than a shared inbox. Many “free” plans lock all three. |
| Credit card required | Asking for a card “just to start” is usually a trial in disguise, with an auto-charge waiting. |
| Hosting | Cloud means nothing to run. Self-hosted open-source means servers, patching and backups on you. |
What “free forever” should look like
A free plan you can actually build on has a few honest signals: no countdown to a paywall, no credit card to begin, a full feature set from day one rather than a locked shell, and clear, optional paid extras for when you genuinely outgrow it. The test is simple - read the pricing page, not the homepage headline. If it explains exactly what you get and where the limits are, that’s a good sign. If “free” only appears in marketing and never in the fine print, be cautious.
Where Raiseaticket fits
For transparency: Raiseaticket is a 100% free, cloud-based helpdesk. The free plan includes 5 agents and 500 tickets a month with the full feature set - email and web ticketing, SLA management, knowledge base and reporting - free forever, no credit card, no trial clock. If you need more capacity you can add agent packs from your workspace, and a handful of features (like workflow automation and Google/Microsoft integration) are optional paid add-ons. No countdown, no surprise bill.
Whichever tool you choose, run it through the five checks first. “Free” is only worth having if it’s still there next year.