What does an IT ticketing system cost?

Two pricing models

Price per agent. You pay for the people who handle tickets. Employees who only report problems cost nothing. Most suppliers have several plans, and important features such as deadlines or sign-in with a company account are often only in the higher ones.

Price per account. You pay for every account with access, IT included. The price per account is lower, but the quantity is larger. Often there is only one plan. Ask what counts as an account. At 404desk, activated accounts count, and prepared accounts do not.

So never compare a per-account price directly with a per-agent price. A company with 100 accounts and two people in IT ends up with very different quantities under the two models.

A licence-only example: 100 accounts and two IT staff

Take 100 activated accounts, two of them in IT. The other suppliers’ prices are net per month with annual billing, according to the suppliers’ own pages, retrieved on 11 November 2026. The figures cover licences only, not operation or rollout, and the plans are not identical feature bundles.

Zammad Professional adds features such as SLAs and a knowledge base compared with Starter. Check the linked supplier pages before purchasing.

The table shows why the basis of the price matters. With two admins, a per-agent price is cheaper in this example. Whether it stays that way depends on the features you get in each plan and on what you pay for elsewhere.

For 404desk: No VAT is charged under the small business scheme (§ 19 UStG).

A worksheet for your own comparison

Enter only what you actually want to use.

Required features and minimum plan:
[ ] Email and employee portal
[ ] Service level targets and business hours
[ ] Microsoft sign-in
[ ] Asset inventory
[ ] Data export

Licence quantity:                   [ ]
Monthly licence total:              [ ]
Monthly add-ons / AI:               [ ]
Hosting and backup per month:       [ ]
Operations hours × internal rate:   [ ]
One-off setup hours × rate:         [ ]
Migration or consultancy:           [ ]

Year one: 12 × monthly costs + one-off costs
Following years: 12 × monthly costs

For your internal time, you can use a full-cost hourly rate of your own choosing. Ten hours of setup at an assumed €60 come to €600 of internal effort. That is a working assumption, not a market price.

Count self-hosting honestly

With open-source software that you run yourself, licence fees fall away. Updates, monitoring, backups and restore tests remain. If the infrastructure runs anyway and someone enjoys the work, self-hosting can be very cheap. If one person looks after everything on top of their other duties, every hour on the server is an hour less for tickets.

Also ask what happens when that person leaves, and who covers the work during holidays. A self-hosted system that only one person understands is a risk that appears in no licence calculation.

A quirk of tiered pricing

Some suppliers charge each additional unit at the rate of its tier. Others apply the rate for the total quantity to every account. At a tier boundary the two approaches produce different bills, and with the second the total price can even fall. Check with every supplier whether a tier applies to all accounts or only to those above it. 404desk applies one rate to all activated accounts in the applicable tier. The minimum and current rates are shown on the pricing page.

Count AI costs separately

Many suppliers sell AI as an add-on. Check which functions are included, how usage is measured and what happens when a limit is reached. A flat fee is easier to plan, while a credit with top-ups is fairer if you use little. What matters is that normal ticket handling carries on when the AI budget is empty. In 404desk, optional AI is billed separately, and ordinary ticket handling continues when the AI credit is used up.

Three company sizes worked out

To give you a feel for the scale, here is the same calculation for three companies. The agent model uses an assumed €20 net per agent per month, not a real supplier price. For your own calculation, use the price of the plan that includes your must-have features.

For 404desk: No VAT is charged under the small business scheme (§ 19 UStG).

For pure licence prices, a per-agent model comes out ahead for small IT teams. The gap shrinks or reverses if the plan with your must-have features costs much more than the entry plan, or if you pay elsewhere for asset management, portal and reports.

Costs that comparisons often leave out

• Add-on modules for inventory, knowledge base or reports.
• Sign-in with a company account, which sometimes only comes with higher plans.
• Minimum quantities for agents, or terms of a year or more.
• Data migration from the old system, internally or by a service provider.
• Exit: what does the export cost, and in which format does it arrive?
• Internal time for maintenance, updates and colleagues’ questions.

Many suppliers quote the price for annual payment, and monthly is more expensive. Calculate both. Annual payment saves money but ties you in, even if the trial shows after three months that the software does not fit. Also check whether the number of agents or accounts can be adjusted up and down during the term, or whether you pay the peak until the end.

And the benefit?

A cost calculation without the benefit is only half the picture. Putting the benefit into euros is hard, but two questions help: how much time does IT lose today to follow-up questions, duplicate answers and searching? And what does it cost if the only person in IT is out for two weeks and nobody knows what is open? Even a rough estimate often puts the licence costs in perspective.

Before you decide, write down:

• The number of accounts with access and the number of people in IT.
• The term and the notice period.
• Net or gross, the currency, monthly or annual billing.
• What leaving costs: export, format, deadline.
• The date on which you looked up the prices.

See the comparison pages for individual alternatives.