Choosing a tool
Start here if you are comparing options and want the prices in one place rather than across seven pricing pages that each hide the seat count in a footnote.
- best customer support apps for MacEvery serious help desk is a web app in a browser tab. These are the ones with a real Mac client, what each is actually for, and which one fits one person.
- best help desk for solo foundersSeven tools priced and tested against one question: what does a single founder answering their own customers actually pay, and what do they get for it.
- best Help Scout alternativesSix Help Scout alternatives compared on the two things that decide it for a small team: what the first seat costs, and whether it keeps your own mailbox.
Doing the work
- customer support as a solo founderHow to run support alone without a team, a ticket system or a canned-response robot voice: the four states a customer can be in, and the one that costs you money.
- IMAP and SMTP settings for a support addressExact IMAP and SMTP hosts, ports and app-password steps for Gmail, iCloud, Fastmail, Zoho, Spacemail, Migadu and your own domain, in one table.
- how to never forget to reply to a customerThe bug is fixed, the refund is sent, the feature shipped, and nobody told the person who asked. Why an inbox cannot catch this, and what does.
- what one help desk seat actually costsPer-seat, per-ticket and per-resolution pricing for eight help desks, priced for the case nobody lists: a single person answering their own customers.
Why there are not fifty of these
Because most of them would never be read. On a sister site running the same playbook, 106 of 130 guides recorded zero impressions in ninety days. Each one still asked Google to spend crawl budget, and that budget comes out of the pages somebody actually searches for. So this list grows when there is something worth saying, and not on a content calendar.