FreeScout

FreeScout is for a team priced out of a per-agent help desk with somewhere to run PHP. The core is free under AGPL-3.0, agents are uncapped, and the database sits on a server you control.

The FAQ is unambiguous: "Are there any limitations on the number of agents or tickets? No." Money moves per module instead. Seventy-one modules are published at $1.99 to $24.00, each a lifetime licence for one instance, and the full set is $539.73 once. The capabilities most buyers shortlist come to $70.97: API and webhooks $12.99, Workflows and SLA rules $14.99, Reports $14.99, Knowledge Base $12.00, SAML SSO $10.00, conversation export $6.00. Audit logs are in core. Hosting is separate, from $2.50 a month.

There is no cloud edition, no trial and no refund: "All payments are non-refundable." No migration tool exists either, and the FAQ says "No for now". A free install cannot get its data out, since conversation export is a $6.00 module and the API is $12.99, which leaves a MySQL dump as the only ungated exit. AI is absent from core, and SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 27001 do not apply because there is no vendor-run service to audit.

Help Scout and Zendesk are the two products FreeScout names itself against, and both bill per user every month where FreeScout bills per module once. Chatwoot self-hosts too but keeps proprietary enterprise code, where every FreeScout module is AGPL-3.0. All four sit in help desk software.