This morning, I got a final warning from Freshdesk—my old support ticket system—telling me my free account would be suspended today unless I upgrade to a paid plan.
To be fair, they gave me a little heads-up a couple months ago. And then followed it up with a 4-day reminder as these marketing sequences often go. You know, just enough time to make me think if I should actually keep it—just in case.
By the way, 2 months isn’t that much time but of course that was in the terms and conditions no one really reads.
I’m not upset about it, actually quite glad and a serendipitous moment. I was already running into restrictions that made me think of using something else. See one of the pain points was that I like to embed right within a ticket a video walkthrough GIF and their tiny 2MB upload limit restriction didn’t cut it.
It’s a business, and they probably have too many people finding the free plan too sufficient, and the upselling hasn’t worked as well. I get it.
So, this just expedited my move. IIRC I had made this primarily a weekend project and started exploring a cutover to a tool like OS Ticket or Redmine. So the initial email about the change doubly justified the time it took eventually make the change.
When I started my solo CiviCRM consulting business last year, I picked Freshdesk because I had some familiarity with it and it was quick, easy, and free. Back story, I pay for several tools for my core business systems in some form, Freshdesk was an aberration.
I just needed a simple ticketing tool to get going and was open to the prospect of using it long-term.
But here’s the thing:
Like most “free” or freemium tools, the terms can change at any time.
That’s the hidden cost: you’re not really in control.
Look, you might say “why are you complaining here? You were just getting something for nothing.” I’m really not complaining, but felt that this was a good example of the “easy -in” dynamic and slippery slope of proprietary software. They almost always start out with a free trial, get you hooked and then you’re on the path toward vendor lock-in.
Whether it’s feature limits or user caps, proprietary platforms can (and do) change the deal whenever it makes sense for their business model.
And think about it, this was “just a ticketing system”. I didn’t have a big need to transfer the ticket system data, though I did get an XML export of all tickets and client account info to reference just in case. If this was a CRM, 2 months to migrate all your data professionally would be a tall task. That’s a bind you don’t want to end up in, so you’d probably just persist on and go with their offer.
And that’s exactly why I made the switch to open source.
I ended up moving to osTicket, an open source support system. Does it take a little setup? Yes. Did I spend a good deal of time figuring out how to overhaul some of the UI with some tweaking of the CSS to make it feel polished and modern for my clients? Sure.
(For those interested, I did some moderate re-theming of the landing page and client dashboard, it’s located at: https://support.civicopilot.com.)
But now I’ve got something that works exactly the way I need it to—with no upsells or the inevitable “your plan is being discontinued” email. Let’s wake up to reality here, they don’t give away free services “just because it’s nice”; it’s an early hook.
But most importantly, I can deliver to my clients exactly the help they need e.g. hooray for GIFs!
CiviCRM is built on the same principle. It’s software you own, with a community that is value-aligned with nonprofits.
And that freedom? That’s worth way more than whatever “free” was worth to me in the first place.