“Free” means different things on a help desk’s pricing page. Before you move a team’s conversations into a tool, it pays to know which kind of free you are looking at, because the difference shows up in month three, not on day one.
Four ways a help desk is free
- A free tier with caps. The product is free up to a number of agents, contacts or conversations, often with fewer channels and a short history. It suits a team of one or two; growing past the cap means a per-agent price for everyone.
- Open source you host yourself. The code is free; the server, the upgrades, the backups and the on-call are yours. It suits teams with operations people and a reason to keep the data in-house.
- A free trial. Usually 14 days of a paid plan. Useful to evaluate, not a way to run support.
- A free product under fair use. The whole product is free, with limits written down to protect the service rather than to sell an upgrade. This is Kommio Cloud’s model.
Well-known free plans, side by side
Checked on each vendor’s pricing page on 20 October 2026. Plans change: check the vendor’s site before you decide.
| Product | Free option | What the free option includes | Paid plans |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwoot | Hacker plan on Chatwoot Cloud; Community Edition to host yourself | Hacker: up to 2 agents, 500 conversations a month, live chat only, 30-day data retention. Community Edition: free, on your own servers | Cloud from $19 per agent a month |
| Help Scout | Free plan | 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts a month | From $25 per user a month |
| Freshdesk | No free plan listed | 14-day trial | From $19 per agent a month, billed annually |
| Zendesk | No free plan | 14-day trial | Per agent a month |
| Intercom | No free plan | 14-day trial | From $29 per seat a month, plus $0.99 per Fin outcome |
| Kommio Cloud | Free, the whole product | Unlimited agents and inboxes, nine channels, automation, AI with a free allowance or your own key, reports, API | None |
Chatwoot’s Community Edition is open source; Kommio is not. If open source is a requirement, that settles it. If what you need is a support desk your whole team can use without a per-agent bill, read on.
Where Kommio fits
Kommio is a customer support platform (help desk and live chat) by Kommio Limited. On Kommio Cloud it is free for every team: no seat pricing, no plan tiers, every feature and every channel. You create a workspace yourself; there is no sales call.
What you get for free:
- One shared inbox for email, website live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, SMS, Slack and API inboxes.
- Assignment by team or inbox with skills and load, SLA policies with business hours, automation rules and macros, chatbot flows and agent bots.
- A knowledge base with a public help center, satisfaction surveys, and reports with medians and p90, exports and a Reports API.
- Roles with per-field masking, an audit trail, two-factor and single sign-on.
- AI assist and an AI agent, off by default, on a free monthly AI allowance (Claude Haiku 5.5 on Kommio’s Anthropic account, under fair use) or on your own Anthropic or OpenAI-compatible key.
- An importer from Chatwoot. The full list is on the features page.
The fair-use limits, in numbers
From the fair-use page, last updated 3 October 2026.
Enforced today:
| What | Limit |
|---|---|
| Agents, administrators, inboxes, channels | Unlimited (above 100 members, tell us so we can plan capacity) |
| Attachments | 25 MB per file; executables refused |
| API requests | 600 a minute per key, 3,000 a minute per workspace |
| Unauthenticated endpoints (sign-in, widget, public) | 300 a minute per IP address |
| Sign-up attempts | 5 an hour and 20 a day per network address; disposable email domains refused |
Reference levels, not enforced:
| What | Level |
|---|---|
| New conversations | 50,000 a month |
| Replies | 500,000 a month |
| Outbound replies | 20,000 a day |
| Contacts | 1,000,000 |
| File storage | 20 GB per workspace |
| Webhook deliveries | 100,000 a day |
| Apps and plugins | 25 installed |
A reference level is where Kommio would write to the workspace’s administrators and agree a plan, most often by raising it. Even then, only what the workspace starts would wait: inbound customer messages, automations, bots and flows are never refused.
What to check in any free plan
- Agents. Does the free tier cover the whole team, including part-timers and supervisors, or will one more hire make it paid for everyone?
- Channels. Live chat only, or email, WhatsApp and social as well? Moving channels later means moving history.
- History. How long are conversations kept on the free plan? Kommio keeps them as long as the workspace exists.
- Data export. Can you take conversations and contacts out through an API at any time? Kommio’s public API covers conversations, contacts and settings.
- AI costs. Many vendors charge per AI resolution. Kommio’s AI runs on a free monthly allowance on Kommio Cloud, or on your own provider key with a monthly budget you set, paid to the provider directly; Kommio adds nothing either way.
- Limits in writing. A free plan whose limits are not published can change under you. Kommio’s are on one page, with the date.
What Kommio does not do
- No voice calls; it is out of scope.
- WhatsApp template messages, needed to start a conversation outside Meta’s 24-hour window, are planned.
- Importers for Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk and Help Scout are planned; today contacts come in by CSV and history through the API. The Chatwoot importer exists.
- The self-hosted edition is the same product, available on request at [email protected]; its public install guide is not published yet.
Comparing with a specific product? See Kommio as an alternative to Chatwoot, Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk and Help Scout, or all six in one table.
Frequently asked questions
Is Kommio really free?
Yes. Kommio Cloud is free for every team: no seat pricing, no plan tiers, every feature and every channel. You sign up yourself at app.kommio.io with no sales call and no credit card. The only costs are your own: a channel provider such as Twilio for SMS, and an AI provider only if you choose your own key over the free AI allowance.
What are the limits?
Enforced today: 600 API requests a minute per key, 3,000 per workspace, 300 a minute per address on unauthenticated endpoints, 25 MB per attachment, and sign-up limits per network address. Published reference levels, such as 50,000 new conversations a month or 20 GB of files per workspace, are not enforced; they are where Kommio would contact the administrators, and inbound customer messages are never refused.
Is Kommio open source?
No. Kommio is free to use on Kommio Cloud, but its code is not open source. A self-hosted edition of the same product exists and is available on request; if open source is a hard requirement, Chatwoot's Community Edition is the closest product.
How do I get my data out of a free help desk?
Check before you start. In Kommio, conversations, contacts and settings can be exported through the public API at any time, conversations also as text, HTML or JSON from the app, and contacts as CSV within what your role may see.
How many agents can use Kommio for free?
As many as you need. Agents, administrators, inboxes and channels are unlimited; above 100 members Kommio asks you to say so, only to plan capacity.
Facts on this page describe Kommio as it is on the date above; anything marked planned is on the roadmap, not shipped. Corrections to [email protected].