All eight, cheapest first
Per seat, per month, annual billing, which is the basis the vendors lead with. Verified 2026-08-22.
| Tool | From | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| A plain mailbox | Free | Nothing has gone wrong yet. |
| Moorline | $9 | One person, on a Mac, permanently. |
| Missive | $14 | A shared inbox and team chat in one app, built around drafting replies collaboratively. |
| Zendesk | $19 | A full customer-service platform: ticketing, routing, SLAs, reporting, voice, and a workforce to run it. |
| Freshdesk | $19 | A conventional ticketing help desk with a generous entry price and a deep feature list above it. |
| Help Scout | $25 | A shared inbox for support teams who want their replies to look like ordinary email rather than tickets. |
| Front | $25 | A collaborative inbox where a team drafts, comments on and assigns replies together in real time. |
| Intercom | $29 | A messaging-first support platform built around an in-app chat widget and the Fin AI agent. |
What actually decides it
Feature grids are not useful here, because every tool on this list has a feature grid you will never exhaust. Three questions decide it instead.
How many people will answer support mail in twelve months?
If the answer is more than one, stop reading comparisons for solo founders and buy a team tool. Everything below assumes the answer is one.
Does your support address have to move?
Help Scout, Zendesk and Freshdesk work by forwarding your address into a mailbox they host. That is right for a team that needs one shared record, and it means your history accumulates somewhere you would have to export it from later. Missive, Front and Moorline connect to the mailbox you already own, though only Moorline keeps the data on your own machine rather than syncing it to a vendor cloud.
What is the failure you are actually trying to prevent?
Most people answer “replying too slowly” and it is usually wrong. For a solo founder the expensive failure is fixing something and never telling the person who asked.Slow replies annoy people; silence after a fix loses them, and it is the state every one of these tools except Moorline records as “resolved”.
The eight, briefly
- A plain mailbox. Free. Delivery, search and spam filtering are already excellent, and you know how to use it. Fails at exactly one thing: it cannot tell a finished conversation from one where you did the work and went quiet.
- Moorline, $9/mo flat. Native macOS, reads your own IMAP mailbox, optional read-only Stripe context, data in a file on your disk. No team features at all, which is the point and also the disqualifier if you hire.
- Missive, $14/user/mo. The best-value shared inbox. Starter leaves out rules, integrations and API access; the tier most people end up on is $24.
- Freshdesk, free then ~$19/agent/mo. Six months free for 1 to 2 agents is the cheapest real entry on this list. Full ticketing, with the ticket model that comes with it.
- Help Scout, $25/user/mo. The most pleasant team inbox, and replies that look like ordinary email rather than tickets. AI Answers is billed separately per resolution.
- Front, $25/seat entry, $65 realistic. Unmatched at several people drafting one reply together. Every bit of that is dormant for one person.
- Intercom, $29/seat plus ~$0.99 per resolution. Messaging-first with a strong AI agent. Your bill grows with the support volume you are trying to grow.
- Zendesk, $19 ticketing or $55 Suite per agent. A genuine support platform. Setup is measured in days, and most of what it configures is handovers between people you do not have.
Questions people actually ask
What is the cheapest help desk for one person?
A plain mailbox, and it is not close. If you want a tool, Freshdesk's free program covers 1 to 2 agents for six months, Missive Starter is $14 a user per month, and Moorline is $9 a month flat. Everything else on this list starts at $19 to $29 per seat and rises.
Do I need a help desk at all as a solo founder?
Not until something has actually gone wrong. The honest trigger is being able to name a customer who never heard back about something you fixed. Before that, a mailbox and some discipline is cheaper and faster than any tool, and most advice to the contrary is written by the people selling the tool.
Should I pick a tool I can grow into?
Only if you know you are hiring. Buying a team tool for a team you might have in two years means paying a per-seat price for one seat for two years, and configuring workflows between people who do not exist. Migrating later is a day of work; overpaying now is every month until then.
What is the difference between a help desk and a shared inbox?
A help desk turns emails into tickets with statuses, queues and reporting, and is built for a support department. A shared inbox keeps them as emails and adds assignment and internal notes, and is built for a small team. Neither shape is built for exactly one person, which is the gap this list exists to point at.
All prices read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-08-22. SaaS pricing moves; if something here is out of date, tell me and it gets corrected.