SupportLayer

When I started building SupportLayer I assumed I'd follow the standard helpdesk pricing playbook — a free tier, a growth tier, a pro tier, each unlocking more features as you pay more. It's what every competitor does, so it felt like the safe choice.

The more I looked at it, the less sense it made.

The features that get gated behind expensive tiers — SLA management, role-based permissions, MFA enforcement, compliance reporting — aren't power-user extras. They're the fundamentals of running a professional support operation. Locking them away felt like charging people extra to do their job properly.

I also noticed something uncomfortable: tiered pricing creates a weird incentive. You're essentially motivated to withhold features from lower-paying customers, which means your cheaper plans are intentionally worse. That felt like the wrong foundation for a product.

So I scrapped the tiers entirely. Every feature, every account, one price. $12 per agent per month, first agent always free.

The pushback I expected was "you're leaving money on the table." Maybe. But the counter-argument is that simple, honest pricing is itself a differentiator in a market where buyers are used to being nickel-and-dimed. When someone lands on the pricing page and sees one number with no asterisks, no "contact us for enterprise pricing," no feature comparison matrix full of padlocks — that's a relief. That relief is worth something.

The other concern was whether $12 was too cheap to be taken seriously. I spent a while on this. I tested $9, which felt too low — more side project than product. I landed on $12, which puts me roughly 20% below Freshdesk's entry paid tier and a fraction of Zendesk, while still feeling like a credible price for a business tool.

Early days yet, but the feedback so far has been that the pricing is the first thing people mention positively. Not the features, not the UI — the pricing. Which tells me the market is more frustrated with how competitors charge than I'd even realised.

Would love to hear from anyone else who's wrestled with pricing decisions — especially whether you've found tiers worthwhile or whether simplicity won out.

Hey IH 👋

I've just launched SupportLayer — helpdesk software for teams that need real SLA accountability without the enterprise price tag.

The short version: most helpdesk tools lock the features small teams actually need — SLA management, proper roles, compliance reporting — behind their expensive tiers. SupportLayer includes everything on every account for $12 per agent, with the first agent always free.

A few things I'm particularly happy with:

The SLA clock pauses when a ticket is waiting on a customer. Most tools run the clock continuously, which means your SLA metrics get punished for time your team spent waiting for a reply. That always felt unfair, so I built it differently.

It also includes a live chat widget out of the box — no extra subscription. You drop a script tag on your website and your team handles chats from the same portal they use for tickets.

And the whole thing is live in under five minutes. Sensible defaults for statuses, priorities, categories and roles — you're not starting from a blank page.

I'd love to hear any feedback, questions, or brutal honesty about the positioning. Still early days and genuinely open to thoughts from people who've built or run support teams.

You can check it out at supportlayer.app — free to get started, no credit card needed.