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A support desk without the per-agent bill

Zendesk, Freshdesk and Help Scout charge for each agent every month, then again for each answer their AI resolves. Faster Support is $5 a month per team: a request form, tickets, triage by an agent, AI answers from your own knowledge, live chat, a customer portal and SLAs on your business hours. The people who answer are team members, at $1 a month each.

• Far lower cost $5 a month per team, and $1 per team member. No per-agent tiers.
• AI at cost Answers from your knowledge, paid at each model’s price, not per resolution.
• One button Request form, tickets, triage agent, support chat and reports, in one step.
• More built in Agents, records, a site, a store and team chat, alongside the desk.

What's different underneath

Pay for the team, not each seat

Every agent is a seat, billed yearly: Zendesk Suite Team $55 and Professional $115 an agent a month, Freshdesk Growth $19 and Pro $55, Help Scout Standard $25 and Plus $45 a user. More SLA, routing and reporting options sit in the higher tiers.

Faster Support is $5 a month per team after a 14-day free trial, with all of it: visitor chat, tag routing, customer accounts and SLAs on your own business hours. The people who work the tickets are team members, at $1 a month each.

AI answers, at the model’s price

AI that resolves conversations is metered: Zendesk charges $1.50 to $2.00 for each automated resolution past a small allowance, Help Scout $0.75 a resolution, and Freshdesk $49 for each 100 Freddy AI Agent sessions past the first 500. Copilots for agents are another per-agent add-on.

Answers come only from your knowledge base, say where they came from, and say so when they don’t know. They’re paid from the team’s AI balance at each model’s own price, with spending limits you set. Knowledge bases are free, built from what you already have: docs, forms, reports and apps.

Triage that runs your process

Triggers, macros and routing rules handle the common cases. Anything that spans other systems, waits for an approval or runs on a schedule needs the platform’s workflow tools, a marketplace app or an outside automation service.

Support Triage, an agent, reads every request, judges its area and urgency, drafts an answer, files the ticket, posts it to the Support chat and emails the customer. Describe any other process in plain words (refunds, escalations, a weekly review) and an agent runs it, waiting for approvals when it must.

The desk, and everything around it

A help desk handles conversations. The records behind them, the site customers start from, bookings, a store, and the team’s own chat and documents live in other tools, joined by integrations.

Tickets sit with the rest of your records: link them to orders, clients or bookings, report on them, and let customers see their own. The site, store, bookings, team chat, docs and sheets are in the same place, on the same bill.

Side by side

What it takes, and where each one comes from.

Stand up the same support desk

A team wants a request form anyone can send, tickets triaged by urgency, answers drafted from its own help articles, live chat on its site, response targets on business hours, and a place where customers follow their requests. Here’s what each takes.

FasterOS: an afternoon, most of it one button

1. Create your team and invite the people who’ll answer1:34 how-to
2. Choose Set up Faster Support: request form, tickets, triage agent, support chat and reports, in one step
3. Connect your docs, forms and reports as its knowledge base
4. Turn on ChatNow, copy its code to your site, and add tag rules
5. Set your support hours once; SLAs count business time from them
6. Customers get a link to their own requests with their first answer

A help desk: a plan, a seat per agent, then the add-ons

1. Pick a plan and a seat for every agent (some put SLAs in a higher tier)
2. Connect your support email and set up the help center
3. Write triggers, macros and routing rules
4. Add AI agents or a copilot, priced per resolution or per agent
5. Install the chat widget on your site
6. Set up SLA policies and business-hour schedules
7. Connect the records behind tickets (orders, clients) through integrations

Each of these does the job well. The difference is the cost per agent, the cost per AI answer, and what lives outside the desk.

Your first year, priced

Our own published prices, and theirs as published or benchmarked. Change anything to match your quotes.

Each of these is one tool for one job, with its own bill. FasterOS is a platform: the first solution pays for your team’s seats, and every one after it (a site, a store, a support desk, agents) adds only its hosting and any add-on.

Beyond a help desk

What a help desk leaves to integrations and other tools, FasterOS does in the same place.

Your first year with each

Help desks

• Add a seat for each new agent, at the tier’s price
• Track AI resolutions or sessions against the allowance
• Move up a tier for more SLAs, routing or reporting
• Pay for the site, the records behind tickets and the team’s tools separately

FasterOS

• Add people who answer at $1 a month
• AI paid at the model’s price, with limits you set
• SLAs, chat and the customer portal in one $5 add-on
• The site, records and team chat in the same place

When a help desk is the better fit

• A large contact center that needs phone, voice and workforce management inside the help desk.
• Support that runs mostly by email, on shared inboxes (FasterOS takes requests by form, chat and the customer portal).
• A team that depends on a particular app from Zendesk’s or Freshdesk’s marketplace.

Questions

Sources, as published in 2026: Zendesk pricing (Suite Team $55, Professional $115 an agent a month billed yearly; automated resolutions $1.50–$2.00; Copilot $50); Freshdesk pricing (Growth $19, Pro $55, Enterprise $89 an agent a month billed yearly; AI Agent $49 per 100 sessions; Copilot $29); Help Scout pricing (Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 a user a month; AI Answers $0.75 a resolution); Help Scout: create and manage SLAs.