We replaced Zendesk
tradecore.com
tradecore.com
Does anyone know of examples of where a private equity buyout has made things better for the consumer?
For software like Zendesk that was already thoroughly professionalized, I agree, it's hard to think of positive attributes to a PE buyout!
When the 65 year old sole proprietor of a local HVAC business sells it to a PE firm, the other option was likely winding down the business. If the owner had children that were interested in running the business, no doubt they would give it to them. But usually that is not the case. So the owner needs to sell. And if there were capitalized, enthusiastic local entrepreneurs that could buy it, no doubt the owner would consider them. But again, this is quite rare.
So the choices usually come down to: close up shop or sell to a PE firm. All other things being equal (which they never are), I think a market with more businesses is going to be more competitive and pro-consumer than a market with fewer businesses. Further, some economists have found that PE activity encourages business formation, perhaps partially explaining why the US has more small businesses per capita than Europe (where they have far less PE). So it's a double whammy: PE causes less businesses to close and more businesses to open.
A short, entertaining article on this topic: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/02/23/rejoice-privat...
It essentially is PE but swallowed by a national construction company is the other end.
I'm all for sticking it to zendesk, but as I tell every single person who were thinking to roll their own solution, have you thought about Integration? That's zendesk's moat. They have an integration with almost every single platform you can think of. It works with all e-commerce, but also ebay and amazon. It can communicate via WhatsApp, imessage, signal, and everything in between. Then connects to salesforce and netsuite.
I know this is a AI generated post, talking about an AI generated app. So next I'm expecting the AI agent deleted our prod database posts.
It's in production for 4 months now.
I've not felt need for anything. We 2-3 custom integration built into it.
The only issue I had was spam. So I thought about adding turnstile but guess what? Cloudflare turnstile was giving me some error so I just added honey pot fields and didn't have any issue so far.
And also sqlite+go is blazingly fast, our agent love the speed.
It's running on $5-6 Hetzner server. Backups using Litestream to s3.
Still: when you code your own solution, you don't need to build an integration with every single platform you can think of. Just those you use.
And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.
Coding a solution was never a problem. Supporting and maintaining it was. I can guarantee you an in-house ticketing system will be more expensive than Zendesk for every small and medium company.
What would it have taken to get this off the ground before? A ton of meetings with stakeholders to decide if this is even a good idea. Meetings with other developers who touch systems you might understand but have never used before yourself. And WAAAY longer than 48 hours to get an MVP prototype off the ground.
It's a little ironic to me that we constantly shit on how broken something underneath the hood is here despite the fact that it works, while in the same breath complaining about the enshitification of products that have been garbage long before AI came along. I'm not going to disagree that vibecoding spits out a lot of garbage, but we're already swimming in garbage so what does it matter?
No it isn't. That is patently untrue. I've had to deal with in-house solutions many times in my careers. Inevitably what happens is the original author leaves the company or just doesn't want to support it and whatever tool they built atrophies and we end up moving to an off-the-shelf product with a lot of pain.
I'm dealing with a homegrown project management tool like that now. Originally built 10-15 years ago - it now has a feature request list a mile long. Finance is annoyed they can't pull the kinds of reports they want, and that it doesn't integrate into our CRM. IT is annoyed it doesn't support SAML and they have to manage backups. The tool is running on whatever the hot stack was at that time - so it is horribly out of date now ... but the original people that wrote it have long since left the company. The engineers don't want to touch it. Product doesn't want engineers to work on it because it takes away from our core business.
There are commercial off-the-shelf tools that provide the same feature-set (+more) and don't tie up my engineers, but now the thing is engrained into workflow and moving off of it is a major project spamming multiple departments (including engineering).
This is like the new racism, just call something that you don't like or want to denigrade as "AI". It works on both sides, both AI lovers and AI haters.
If only you cared to read the article.
A human spent time writing it, they gave two purposefully narrow commitments that if someone care to read the article, you'd know comes from a human.
As I see it, this is a story about knowing a domain inside out and an alarm for SaaS companies.
I built https://pointanswer.com/ for myself to host 3 of my own SaaS instead of paying more than $100/mo for simple helpcenter. I'm the only one using it with no customers but it's still way better than paying for Zendesk.
But did spent too much time on it as I built in pre-Claude era.
My personal experience: For many years I used Zendesk to manage support and host my documentation. It's a powerful platform with help center structure that I liked liked the most. I was paying about US$30/mo for OnVoard.
When I use Zendesk for my second SaaS business, RenderKu, it costs me $70/mo. This amount is more than 3 Hetzner servers I'm paying to host the whole infrastructure. And I'm only choosing Zendesk mainly for hosting documentation.
At this point, when I was planning to start my 3rd app business, the thought of forking another $70/mo for hosting documentation made me rethink my options. I've eventually come to the conclusion it would be better for me to start PointAnswer and use it as helpcenter for myself since I only needed simple and affordable helpcenter.
I certainly don't think Zendesk's core business is threatened here, and I have no desire to replace Zendesk with a custom solution. But Zendesk's ability to upcharge, sell adjacent products, and pass on cost increases is hugely threatened. If PE was planning on a decade of consistent cost increases and more land, that dream seems materially threatened!
the password reset link if you replace "console/console" with "console" it should work.
I will push a fix shortly.
Just get an AI bot to make one for you
the value platforms provide is that _you_ didn't make the software, somebody else did, so somebody else defines the functionality and workflow of the software. it can be treated as fixed, and a thing that people learn how to use. they have support docs and training resources for your staff to access. when somebody has a problem, you can tell them to make a ticket with freshdesk not with you.
if you make the software in-house, you have to also make all those training resources yourself. you have to make all the ui decisions. and you have to defend those ui decisions, even when each of your support staff wants something different, and knows there's nothing preventing you from changing it to exactly what they want. even when exactly what they want contradicts with what the person sitting next to them wants.
Also nice try Zendesk ;)
There is just so much clunk and developer hostile stuff going on that I would rather just not deal with it anymore.
He’s not a software developer, he has no concept of software maintenance or security.
I’ve been watching and it’s interesting to me because I would not be surprised that he’s not alone as a small family business. Many probably feel liberated from company’s that would enforce a certain cookie cutter shape.
Does this mean AI is shifting towards contractor jobs more? Does it mean a huge security issue brewing? Both? Maybe business owners turned SWVibers like him will swing back to an off the shelf option once pouring more effort into 3am-my-stuff-is-broke scenarios becomes more of a chore than it’s worth.
I feel like there are a million billion green field projects brewing that will soon turn brown for one reason or another.
I mean, that's what, as an industry, we're all desperately hoping for, but, well, shit. ChatGPT-5.5 is quite capable, so if the business owner is disciplined and prompts it with thought, I'm not so sure those greenfield projects are going to turn brown. Hell, if I was an AC business owner, would I rather pay a software startup who think they know the AC business, or pay another AC business owner to use the software they wrote?
"Your job isn't going to be taken by AI, it's going to be taken by someone using AI" -Jenson Huang
Problem is, that person using AI is from outside our field. (Not a problem for the AC business owner who has a new product to sell! Good on them, if they choose to go that route.)
Too true!
> if the business owner is disciplined and prompts it with thought
That’s a big “if”. For now, at least I wonder if conversations change from “I have an idea for an app…” to “I have an app that is having problems…”
Case in point, I had to help him fix an issue where the state was being persisted _in the link_. Not something I expected.
As someone who's had to maintain a Zendesk integration such as this for a large app it's hard to understate the benefit of having all that support info so close to the rest of your user's data. I have seen a huge amount of effort go into trying to get just the right balance of data in and out of ZD. Also helps alleviate concerns with sharing too much customer data with a third party.
This definitely isn't the right call for everyone, but there's a lot of upside if it can work for your organization.
Actually LLMs are like the ultimate laziness enabler. But as people adjust their expectations this stuff will no longer look impressive, since people will know it's just AI slop, and the lazies will fade back into obscurity.
The correct answer to this behavior needs to be "lol no" until these companies learn this behavior is unacceptable at any price. They could've boiled the frog at a 10% annual hike and nobody would've cared, but you double and you are fired as a vendor and that's that.
Man, they must have gotten paid crazy overtime. Kudos!
lol first time?
We kind of tried Zendesk maybe 8 years ago and even integrated the chat into our Electron app.
What put me off though is that support articles didn’t work off markdown, there was no way I wanted us having all our docs formatting and images locked up by them. We had already started using DocFX which was working pretty well for us.
As it happens, the integrated chat wasn’t that popular amongst our users anyway so we cancelled it not long after.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out that in the age of AI and LLMs that our Docs (which over time had become really good) are an enormous asset.
They allowed the AI integration in our product to work really well since the LLMs already understood a lot about our product from our Docs and they also behave as kind of marketing material as they organically show up in search results or LLM chats (we’ve gained a couple of clients who found us through ChatGPT).
A funny thing about our Docs, we always felt they were lacking and resigned ourselves to doing the best we could, even though it seemed they would never be good enough.
Then seemingly all of a sudden this year, we were almost surprised to find that they actually do seem to be quite good now.
I think it’s largely that we were continuously investing in them, but also that once we saw how LLMs could answer questions on our product really well, it became apparent that a lot of our customers just weren’t really looking at them, but now many of them kind of are, just via an LLM.
I only built the 20% they actually needed, with faster UI and better UX.
If you freelance, this is where you can make money with AI.
This idea that software developer productivity being the goal for AI companies is just not it - every piece of code you put into an LLM is a you giving these giant companies your expertise
People need to remember where the bulk of engineering money goes: consumer advertising and consumer facing applications, and don’t forget most of them have tragically bad user experiences and dark patterns because they’re trying to make the software as a service model work for investors
if I can spend a week replicating your software that has all these bullshit dark pattern features and I can replicate that for my own why why wouldn’t I?
i guess the problem is that once a teamp goes through the process of figuring out good UX for a certain flow, which can take time, that UX then becomes trivial to copy.
So knowing a software architecture for something you use is the HARDEST part to observe and the UX is the easiest to observe.
provided you can describe what you observe, and your desired workflow that matches your need, then you can replicate it provided you understand how to test and iterate, which again is trivial to learn.
Combine:
Observations of workflows to implement and
Notional data architecture
You can create a slimmed down version of pretty much anything.
I mean this is basically every image editor compared to Photoshop.
A designer that is used to all the features Photoshop has, and then you just use the most common workflows that most people use, to be the feature bootstrap for your Photoshop alternative that’s much lighter weight and cheaper etc.
It’s measuring time to iterate/ship, cost reduction and independence, which is really all that matters
Reusable was great because it used to be the fastest. The fastest now is vibe/slop > iterate > iterate > iterate > ship > iterate > ship etc…
Make a new one from scratch if needed.
Have fun Chesterton's fencing yourself into much of what other companies spent years learning and solving.
Prototypes and proofs of concept were easy even before AI.
Which is why you start from the principles that were “learned and solved” in the past.
Literally none of those things that you’re talking about Chestertons fence hopping are secrets or hidden
They’re very well documented in product design, project management, cybernetics, IT etc…
There’s been thousands and thousands of articles written about all the different ways to build: functional programming, monorepo vs micro services, strong typed, memsafe etc….
there’s infinite number of framework debates that are already embedded in the LLMs that you simply need to interrogate as part of the planning process before you ship anything
It’s actually really simple.
The reality is that 99% of software engineers never gave care about any of that ever. Go ask your average software engineer about Parness information hiding or Conway law inversions.
These things are trivially easy to grasp and make engineering intuitively simple to avoid MOST problems. I am consistently teaching principal engineers, VP, senior software engineers, people who know how to write code about basic basic basic information theory. It’s honestly embarrassing.
I think it's common to claim to care about the people without really depending on them for much (like with perks) or to depend on the work but treat people badly, and doing both is hard.
Why not make an open source alternative to the product?
Because everyone's needs are just a little different, and collaborating takes maintenance. Forks are free, merges are expensive.
I guess that is a valid solution to that prompt.
Large companies may have difficulty embracing this strategy because software is a cost center, and not a revenue center, for them. The returns to efficiency gains are really hard to measure.
And if someone has gone to the bother to make a prompt that helps my LLM build one, and it either already doesn't have the features I don't need, or I can have my LLM start by trimming the features I don't need before it builds it...
Then I think you're saying the same thing I'm saying.
The scary part for some existing companies is that the situation is very rarely "oh you could have chosen to be more forward-thinking and you just didn't". Many companies just don't have the expertise, infrastructure, processes, or authority to do this. If you don't, you don't, and for you, Zendesk will be a better option, for as long as you're able. Its natural selection.
The final straw was attempting to move Zendesk down to one seat to have historical/archive capabilities for a period of time, and they couldn't even manage that process properly.
On a different note, what Zendesk did is pretty much regular play now, hopefully some serious competition will keep that in check.
Cool story but I would not want to be in their shoes. Treating your employees poorly only to justify overnight changes in business needs creates a highly toxic work environment.
If I worked there I'd be immediately looking for a new employer, I guarantee this isn't the first time they've done stuff like this over the years.
They had a strong understanding of exactly what zendesk was doing for them and how it integrated with their other stuff.
People hoping to do something similar should try to put themselves in a similar situation.
As is most things in engineering, this is a trade-off and the line where buy vs build exists somewhere to be found and justified. Sure AI moves the line closer to build these days.
I strongly believe the build/buy equation is much different in 2026 than it was in 2024
That said - Docusign has a moat because people are afraid (and CYA) by using them instead of anything else. To make an eSignature legal isn't really that complex, you just need hash based attribution, some timestamps and some ToS.
Replacing Docusign with something else is no where close to having an AI represent you in court
One started out as an acquisition of a group on sales force, we wrote migrated to our brand new crm the first month and integrated our PBX and several other functions within the first 3 months.
It's not hard, most CRMs don't need "webscale", you can whip up a highly targeted and integrated CRM in rails in the blink of any eye.
That's why I'm pretty sure in 2001/02 I had the earliest real customer, real time, audio reviews published online in the world.
Like any decision during a startup buy/build is a situation specific decision you have to make at every point and 3rd party CRMs are fine to launch with... but, I mean, come on.