Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

support.zendesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#11

Post by jonknee »

patio11 wrote: post #6

Do my eyes deceive me or are companies with 20 employees at their help desk complaining that a thousand bucks is a lot of money? I think we are seeing a later day MMORPG forum. At some point, it is easier to argue for a patch for your class than get 1 pct more stats, so you stop playing the game and start playing the boards. ZenDesk is the vendor most likely to drop prices by 1k for a single fauxraged posting, so sta…

It could be 20 third-world employees. A client of mine uses ZenDesk and staffs it out of the Philippines. $1,000 is a ton of money in that regard especially when the hefty increase comes out of the blue. It's also straight users so if you have part time people it adds up quickly. Especially so when you factor in management that have accounts just to check up on staff.

However I think the biggest thing is they didn't sign up for $1,000. They signed up for half that. Regardless of the figures no one likes seeing a 74% raise in cost.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#12

Post by enntwo »

Regardless of who's side you fall on, I think this is a pretty good example of why allowing public comments is a bit of a dangerous move.

(Clearly the more dangerous move here was the price hike, but I do not know the internals of the company that led to the decision, or the interest that it was in, so I will not comment on that so much.)

It is tough to imagine them recoverving from the sort of mob-rule that has formed in that comment thread, even if they restore current pricing plans. So much doubt was created amongst the users, which of course spread to twitter, here, and others, and you can see the discussion clearly degrade from concern to rage.

Public interaction with users can be helpful to show a personal side of the company and try to show a strong effort for support/interaction, but do not forget that this risk exists. As with anything, use with caution.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#13

Post by mrkurt »

patio11 wrote: post #6

Do my eyes deceive me or are companies with 20 employees at their help desk complaining that a thousand bucks is a lot of money? I think we are seeing a later day MMORPG forum. At some point, it is easier to argue for a patch for your class than get 1 pct more stats, so you stop playing the game and start playing the boards. ZenDesk is the vendor most likely to drop prices by 1k for a single fauxraged posting, so sta…

Relative to what they were paying, a thousand bucks is a lot of money. It's also a lot of money relative to what other companies are charging for similar services.

The definition of an "agent" is pretty vague for many places too. We, for instance, could probably have 40 "agents" handling help desk duties if we let our volunteer forum moderators help out with user support issues like I'd like to.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#14

Post by paraschopra »

patio11 wrote: post #6

Do my eyes deceive me or are companies with 20 employees at their help desk complaining that a thousand bucks is a lot of money? I think we are seeing a later day MMORPG forum. At some point, it is easier to argue for a patch for your class than get 1 pct more stats, so you stop playing the game and start playing the boards. ZenDesk is the vendor most likely to drop prices by 1k for a single fauxraged posting, so sta…

If there is one thing that I have learnt from "Predictably Irrational" book, it is that humans make their money-related decisions by having a reference point. Zendesk could have always been priced at thousand bucks and no one would have complained. But once you set the price, you provide your customers with a reference point which they are going to use. You can't run away from that.

For example, even though Microsoft Office probably provides a lot more value than what it costs, it they doubled their prices overnight, would you not expect any outrage?

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#15

Post by uptown »

It seems like the are requiring the grandfathered customers to pre-pay a full year because maintaining two monthly pricing structures is more trouble to manage.

But I'm curious what kind of blowback a company like this might face if existing customers were grandfathered into the old pricing plan for life. Would new customers resent existing customers? Without knowing Zendesk's financial situation, it's hard to know whether they're doing this out of necessity ... but it seems like the goodwill to the customers that made them what they are would be worth the trouble of managing two different pricing tiers.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#16

Post by jfager »

aarongough wrote: post #10
jfager wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That grandfathering requires paying the year upfront, though.

They said later in the comments that it is possible to pay quarterly and still receive the grandfathering...

They said "you can change your billing cycle to a quarterly cycle in order to extend grandfathering beyond July 1st billing cycle" - so one additional quarter, if you prepay for that quarter, followed by the increased prices.

The only way you get current prices for another year is by prepaying by July 1.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#17

Post by ahoyhere »

I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible.

There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - since the form is the same - you will realize that they must know about that problem, for months even, and have never fixed it.

We were paying $100/mo for ZenDesk around a year ago, and the price was fine. Theoretically good value for the money. But every one of my team hated it so much, they would never actually log in.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#18

Post by adamhowell »

enntwo wrote: post #12

Regardless of who's side you fall on, I think this is a pretty good example of why allowing public comments is a bit of a dangerous move. (Clearly the more dangerous move here was the price hike, but I do not know the internals of the company that led to the decision, or the interest that it was in, so I will not comment on that so much.) It is tough to imagine them recoverving from the sort of mob-rule that has form…

Not to mention it gives TechCrunch a permalink of juicy, pissed off comments to write a post about.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#19

Post by boredguy8 »

I don't see why changing prices is a big deal. Apparently there's some pent-up frustration, but there is a real cost to keeping services online. If the price of electronic books doesn't increase over the next two years, I'll be astonished.

And in fact, there's real danger to a business in terms of how they price their product. We were early adopters of RightNow, and we still pay an absurdly low price for their product (which we host) compared to other people, all because it's grandfathered in. Now this hurts them less because we host it, but you can imagine if they had to grandfather us in at the prices they were charging when they were new, it could really hurt them.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#20

Post by pclark »

tyrelb wrote: post #2

Alternatives: http://www.activecampaign.com/help-desk-software/ http://www.kayako.com/ http://webhelpdesk.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp http://tenderapp.com/ http://www.cerberusweb.com/ http://www.thevisionworld.com/ http://www.autotask.com/software/service_desk.htm

Tender App is especially great
Post reply on HN