Zammad helpdesk deployment See what's included

Enterprise Help Desk, Powered by Agentic AI.

Zendesk, Freshdesk and similar tools charge per agent, every month. We install Zammad, a full helpdesk that handles email, chat, phone and social, on your own cloud or servers. Pay us once. Add unlimited agents. Migrate from whatever you use today in a single weekend.

Get a fixed quote See what you'd save
Production-ready in 5 business days Migration from any helpdesk included Data stays in your own cloud
In daily use at companies you'd recognise, and a few you wouldn't.
Tribe Consulting Northbeam Logistics CodingKey Ferrolab GmbH Kestrel Defense Vector Systems International Brindle & Co. Halen Health
The math

Stop renting your
helpdesk by the seat.

Zendesk, Freshdesk and Intercom charge $79 – $150 per agent, per month, forever. Aërgap replaces that with one setup fee and pay-as-you-need consulting. Pick your incumbent, set your headcount, watch the gap open up.

  • No per-seat fees. Hire 50 agents tomorrow without re-negotiating a contract.
  • Own your data. Tickets, customers, attachments, all stored in your own cloud, your region.
  • Predictable cost curve. The OSS licence is and will remain €0. You pay us to operate it well.
  • Same channels, same SLAs. Email, chat, phone, social, knowledge base, customer portal. Feature parity with what you'd buy.
  • Switch without the rip-and-replace. We migrate tickets, macros, SLAs and users from your current tool, then run it for you.
Side-by-side cost simulation
Your current helpdesk $115 / agent · mo
Zendesk Suite
5-year total
$103,500
Aërgap Growth · self-hosted
setup + run
$9,500
You'd save
$94,000
≈91% less over 5 years
Lock this quote
Replaces Zendesk Freshdesk Intercom HubSpot Service Front LiveAgent Kayako
What we deploy

A full helpdesk,
opinionated & production-grade.

Zammad is mature, multi-channel and free, but raw open source needs work to feel enterprise-ready. We do that work on your side of the gap, then hand you the keys.

Unified inbox across email, chat, phone, social and APIs

Every conversation lands in one queue, auto-tagged, SLA-tracked and routed by your rules. We wire up Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Twilio, Telegram and your custom systems.

JMRe: shipment lost in transitemailReplied
RBInvoice export blank PDFchatSLA 14m
SKNeed bulk-edit on tagsportalOpen
DTLogin throws 500 after SSOphoneSLA 02h
ALCancel subscription requestemailTriage
VPWhere is my refund?chatReplied

SLA, escalations & reporting that survives auditors

Per-customer SLAs, business-hours math, automatic escalation chains and weekly KPI reports. Built for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 evidence.

SSO, 2FA, RBAC & encryption out of the box

SAML / OIDC against Entra ID, Okta or Google. End-to-end encryption at rest. Role-based access reviewed before go-live.

Lossless migration from any helpdesk you currently run

We map fields, preserve thread history, attachments, customer IDs and CSAT scores from whichever tool you're on today. Cut-over in a single weekend window.

24/7 monitoring & quarterly upgrades

We watch your instance, ship Zammad upgrades, patch the underlying OS and run quarterly DR drills. Your team only sees a healthy desk.

Knowledge base & customer portal, branded for you

Self-serve articles, ticket portal and CSAT surveys on your domain, themed to your brand, indexed for SEO, available in 30+ languages.

The engagement

One week from kick-off
to first ticket replied.

A repeatable, no-drama deployment that we've run dozens of times. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed timeline.

Discovery & scoping

Workshops to map channels, fields, SLAs, current tooling and the cut-over window. You leave with a written spec.

Day 1

Deploy & harden

Zammad on your cloud (AWS, Azure, Hetzner, on-prem). TLS, backups, SSO, RBAC and observability baked in.

Day 2 – 3

Migrate & train

Import historical tickets and contacts. Two live training sessions for agents and one for admins. Playbooks delivered.

Day 4 – 5

Cut-over & care

Weekend cut-over with rollback ready. Then 30 days of white-glove care included with every plan.

Day 6 – 7
Side by side

Aërgap vs the
per-seat incumbents.

How an open-source, self-hosted desk compares to the per-agent SaaS your finance team keeps wincing at. We left the comparison conservative on purpose.

Capability Typical per-seat SaaS Aërgap deployment
€License model $80 – $150 per agent, monthly One-time setup, no recurring license
ACost for 15 agents · year one $13,500 – $26,800 from $1,000 + hosting cost
ACost growth at 30 agents Doubles automatically Stays flat, agents are free
DData residency control Limited / paid add-on Your tenant, any region
SSource code & extensibility Closed source 100% open source
⚙Custom workflow code Marketplace / paid tier Anything Ruby / JS can do
→Vendor lock-in High, contracts, data export limits None, leave anytime
⏱Time to production 4 – 12 weeks of procurement 5 business days
Honest pricing

Pay once to launch.
Pay only for help you actually need.

No per-seat fees, no MRR. Three setup tiers plus consulting at $50/hour, billed in 15-minute increments.

Starter
≤ 5 agents

For small teams replacing a basic per-seat helpdesk.

$1,000
one-time setup · 30-day care included
  • Hosted on your cloud (AWS / Azure)
  • Web portal for ticket creation
  • SSO configured
  • Out-of-the-box views, tags & automations
  • Two training sessions
Start with Starter →
Growth
Most picked

For 5–25 agent teams moving off a mid-market SaaS desk.

$2,000
one-time setup · 10 consulting hours bundled
  • Everything in Starter
  • Email & chat channels
  • Branded customer portal
  • Knowledge base
  • Migration (Freshdesk, Zendesk)
  • 90-day care
  • Quarterly health check
Book a scoping call →
Scale
25 + agents · regulated

For regulated teams: SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA flavour.

From $4,000
fixed-fee, scoped after a free workshop
  • Multi-region HA deployment
  • On-prem option (air-gapped supported)
  • Pen-test report & evidence pack
  • Custom roles, RBAC & audit logs
  • Dedicated engineer, 4h SLA
Request a workshop →
Post-launch rates

Two kinds of work. Two honest rates.

Deciding what to build is senior work. Building it is hands-on-keyboard work. We price them separately.

Senior consulting

Decisions, design, review

$50/ hour · 15-min increments

Your time with a senior engineer or architect. The deliverable is a decision or a written spec, not code.

  • Helpdesk workflow & SLA design
  • Channel & integration architecture
  • Migration strategy from Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom
  • Code review on every PR before it ships
  • Performance, security & compliance reviews
  • Production incident response
Billed per session · ad-hoc or retained
Custom development

Triggers, integrations, themes

$15/ hour · billed by the hour, no minimum

Our development team working against a scoped ticket, in your Git repo. The thinking has already happened, this is hands on keyboard.

  • Custom triggers, schedulers & macros from a spec
  • Object attributes, ticket fields, custom views
  • REST & webhook integrations to documented APIs
  • Knowledge base themes & customer portal styling
  • Bug fixes & automated tests on your code
  • UI tweaks, labels, translations, upgrades
Need an always-on safety net? $150 / month managed care covers monitoring, security patching and 4-hour change requests.
Book a scoping call →
★ Always free · Official Zammad documentation

Read the manual, then run the manual.

Zammad ships with two complete, versioned doc trees, one for the admins running the system and one for the agents living in it. Both are open, searchable, multilingual, and kept in lock-step with every release. We bookmark the relevant chapters for your team during handover.

2
Doc tracks
200+
Chapters
9
Languages
$0
For your team
For administrators
Admin Documentation

Install, configure and operate Zammad, channels, SLAs, roles, integrations, scaling, backups.

  • System & settings
  • Channels (email, chat, phone)
  • Users, roles & groups
  • SLAs & triggers
  • Object & macro editor
  • LDAP / SAML / OAuth
  • API & webhooks
  • Backup & upgrade
admin-docs.zammad.org Open
For agents & end-users
User Documentation

Day-to-day handbook for agents working tickets and end-users using the customer portal.

  • The agent interface
  • Working a ticket
  • Time tracking
  • Knowledge base
  • Text modules
  • Overviews & tabs
  • Customer portal
  • Notifications
user-docs.zammad.org Open
Versioned for every release: Admin · latest User · latest
Browse the docs
FAQ

Frequently
thought-through.

If something below isn't clear, we'd genuinely rather take a 20-minute call than write more copy.

Talk to a human →
For 90% of mid-market support teams, yes. The platform we deploy covers omnichannel inboxes, SLAs, automation, a customer portal, knowledge base, reporting and a full REST API. Where it intentionally differs is the licensing model: there is no per-seat fee, ever. That single fact saves most teams more than the entire Aërgap engagement in year one.
Anything that touches your Zammad instance after go-live: new automations, workflow changes, custom reports, new channels, version upgrades, training sessions, integration work, performance tuning. Hours are billed in 15-minute increments, small tweaks cost small amounts. A typical Growth customer uses 2–6 hours per quarter.
In your cloud tenant, in the region you specify. We do not host data on Aërgap infrastructure, that's literally the point of the name. Access during the engagement is logged, scoped to least-privilege, and revoked at handover. We sign DPAs and can operate under your existing IAM rules.
Zammad is open source under AGPL with a large community and commercial backer. Your instance keeps running, every config, dashboard and automation is documented in a runbook you own. You can hire any Zammad-literate engineer (or us, later) and pick up exactly where we left off.
We run a dry import a week before cut-over and reconcile counts with you. The real cut-over happens during a quiet window (usually Saturday morning) and freezes your existing helpdesk read-only for ~3 hours. We map fields, custom statuses, organizations, CSAT scores, and re-attach files. If anything looks off, we roll back inside the same window.
One part-time admin is enough, usually whoever runs your current helpdesk. They handle day-to-day user management and triage tweaks. Anything heavier (a new channel, a custom report, a version upgrade) goes through us as consulting hours.
Included in care and consulting bundles. We test new Zammad versions on a staging copy first, run a smoke-test suite, then deploy to production during a scheduled window. Critical CVEs are patched within 72 hours regardless of plan.

Run support like grown-ups. Stop paying like a startup.

30-minute scoping call. Free. You leave with a written quote and a deployment plan, even if you decide to stay on your current tool.

Book a scoping call Get a quote →