Ask HN: Good, cheap hosted customer service ticket management? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good, cheap hosted customer service ticket management?

My startup ( http://www.obsidianportal.com ) is actually taking off quite well now, but I'm beginning to get buried in customer support requests. They all come to a single email address, and I share answering them with my partner. Our policy is to cc the support address with our response so the other person knows it's being handled.

Anyway, that worked fine when we were getting 1-2/week. Now we're getting 2-3/day, and they're starting to fall through the cracks.

We'd like to start using some sort of hosted ticket management, but want to do it on the cheap. $5-$10/mo is our range. We've looked at http://tenderapp.com/ and it's pretty much what we want, but $240/yr is just too high.

Any other solutions people can recommend?

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I recommend RT:

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

If you have a linux host, you can download the open source package and install it yourself. There are directions in the wiki on how to do stuff like have it handle the support email even when you are using Google Apps.

Another option for installing it is to setup a linux on one of your home cable modems, and use dyndns to get to it. Since only you and your partner have to get to the web interface, shut off all ports but https and also throw an http auth password on the whole thing. This will cost you $0 out of pocket to run, probably half a day or longer to set up depending on your skills. If you don't already leave a computer on all the time, you will have to pay for the additional electricity.

You can email the address in my profile if you run into anything weird setting it up. The IRC channel on irc.perl.org is polite and helpful.

I've tried Kayako and Cerberus and they are both fine. Kayako is hosted for $30-$40/mth for unlimited users, I think. Cerberus is about the same. Where these shine is in their knowledge base - you can have a both public and private KB.

http://www.kayako.com/

http://www.cerberusweb.com/

My thoughts are that hosted solutions are an absolute ripoff compared to buying the software and installing it yourself on a POS box. You can buy Cerberus for like $350, I think, and that includes everything.

fog bugs is free for startups. they also have a hosted version. Definitively worth checking, IMO

Nice! Just what I was looking for.

tried zendesk? it's awesome.

although it is definitely not cheap... :)

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