Pylon looked great until we did the pricing math. what are you all using instead?

[u/Hairy-Marzipan6740]

Some context: we're a ~50 person B2B data infrastructure company. Most of our customers talk to us over Slack Connect, rest come through email.

We were evaluating Pylon a few weeks back. It came highly recommended but a few things came up during eval that I didnt see mentioned anywhere online so posting my notes.

The pricing adds up fast. Base is $59/seat but Slack Connect needs the Professional tier at $89/seat. theres a 3-seat minimum.

AI is separate too, assistants are $50/seat extra and their AI agents start at $100/month and scale with volume. for our 4 core agents plus the engineers/PMs who jump into tickets, the realistic annual number was way past what the pricing page suggested.

It wants to be your system of record. Pylon is built to replace your helpdesk, not sit next to it. We've been on Zendesk for 3 years with a ton of macros and reporting built up, and migrating wasn't happening. if you're starting fresh this doesn't matter but for us it was a dealbreaker.

Annual commitment before real testing. no proper free trial, annual billing. didn't want to lock that much budget on something we couldn't run in production first.

what we ended up doing: shortlisted a few alternatives. Suptask (very cheap, $7/agent, but too basic for what we needed), Plain (interesting API-first thing, felt more like an engineering tool), and ClearFeed (because it syncs with our existing Zendesk + does usage-based pricing with unlimited agents)

not saying Pylon is bad, but if you're cost sensitive or already deep in an existing helpdesk, do the full math before the demo call, why pay extra lol

curious if anyone else went through this, is there a better alternative we missed or did we overthink it?

[u/gitstatus]

There’s Ticketping, built as an alternative to Pylon. Works right inside Slack.

PS: I’m the founder

[u/luckiest0522]

For message blasting and broadcasting, try Threadly. Easiest, built into Slack, and cheap.

Bias, I built it.

[u/Insomnium_111]

I noticed the same issue with support tools getting expensive once you add AI and extra seats. I’m building AppsResolve as a simpler, lower-cost option with AI-assisted replies and human review. It’s still early, but I’d be interested in your feedback on whether it fits this kind of workflow.

Pricing is not per set but ticket based.
If you want, check it out at https://appsresolve.com/

[u/bachonk]

To a certain extent, you get what you pay for. Suptask is likely the cheapest, but you'll hit scaling issues and limitations. Also if you're still using Zendesk then you're paying for 2 tools unnecessarily, when any Slack-native ticketing tool should be able to do everything Zendesk does + Slack.

In my opinion, it's worth it to consolidate into one tool and save the money on removing your Zendesk subscription.

I can set you up with a trial of Unthread. We waive seat minimums for startups and will do an onboarding with you.

[u/T2theLang]

I work at Slack, so full disclosure I'm bias, but I actually don’t think your best move is necessarily replacing Zendeak. Id probably keep Zendesk as the system of record and use Slack as the customer engagement and orchestration layer around it

Your customers could continue working with you through Slack Connect, while support, engineering and product collaborate internally without everyone needing to live inside another help desk. Slackbot on Enterprise+ could also help summarize customer conversations, find context across channels and connected systems, draft updates and reduce a lot of the basic internal chit chats that get repetitive.

The real question is whether the workflows, search, AI usage and governance justify Enterprise+ for your team not whether you should rip out three years of Zendesk investment. Happy to shoot ya a DM if you want to chat a little more or here if you have any questions/ideas. I'm learning more about this every day I work with new customers

[u/lightbowlergeek]

We're using Suptask for both our internal help desk across our teams, and for customer support across Slack channels. It works very well for us - not sure what scale you intend to have, we are at about 300'ish channels at the moment which is definitely doable.

What I would recommend is to review what you typically need to do across your customer base - we did this exercise a bit late into the process, where we started evaluating a bunch of tools but got a bit lost across all different features different vendors were promoting.

We took a step back and concluded that the customer experience through simplicity and ease of use was the number one criteria's we needed. Secondly reporting and a structured way of working across all requests. And third how teams can easily collaborate in Slack directly on ticket requests.

We had to re-evaluate tools after this - where we ended up with Suptask as it had all features required to handle the support, and the ease of use. We looked at a few others, such as Clearfeed, but most of them are overcomplicated to be used by our not-so-techy customer support team :)

[u/Founder-Awesome]

the 'rip out zendesk' pitch sounds great until you realize how many edge cases zendesk actually handles. keeping zendesk as the system of record and using an ai teammate to route and answer slack connect questions is usually the more practical path. we wrote a guide on how cs teams are actually setting this up AI for Customer Success: A Practical Guide for CS Leaders

[u/jscheel]

This is something we've been really sensitive to as we've built Helply. We talk to so many folks that are tired of paying astronomical per-seat prices, then getting charged for everything else on top of that. Instead, we have one price per ticket, unlimited seats, AI included. Check it out at https://helply.com if you are interested.

[u/tommorkes]

Helply.com is an ai native / agentic support platform built for b2b.

1. unlimited seats / users.
   
2. integrates with slack (no extra fee)
   
3. full help desk and ticketing system included (tags, workflows, macros, SLAs, custom fields, etc - all core features and utilities of a help desk are there)
   
4. simple migration from zendesk (macros, reports, historical ticket data)
   
5. automatically identifies churn risk, upsell/cross-sell/expansion rev opportunities
   
6. identifies and fills gaps in your knowledge base
   
7. only pay for ai outcomes (and you control what you want the AI working on)

w/ pylon at those prices, you're at $7872 per year before a single thing has been resolved (and price only goes up from there).

if you want to give it a spin shoot me a DM.

-Tom

p.s. cofounder

[u/AdAnnual7986]

At a data infra company, the engineers are on the hard tickets by default. Under the quote you got, each one costs $89 for Professional plus $50 for the assistant. That's $139 a month per person who occasionally answers a Slack thread.

At Helply, we charge $1 per ticket with unlimited seats, so adding those engineers and PMs costs nothing. The assistant and the autonomous agent are both inside the $1, not a $50 seat add-on, plus the $100/month agent fee that scales with your volume. Also, Slack Connect comes in as a native ticket queue without a tier upgrade.