Danish-American SaaS outfit Zendesk counts itself among the most highly rated customer service platforms on the market, lauded for its enterprise-level ticketing and conversation tracking capabilities. Since its founding in 2007, the company has accumulated a user base of over 100,000 companies, thanks to early adoption from big names like X (formerly Twitter) to handle customer queries.
As a result, Zendesk has been a key influence in the culture of responding to customer complaints through social media — and now, it supports companies to better their customer experience across more channels than ever.
So, if you’re looking for a platform to transform your customer experience, Zendesk could be the answer.
But before you reach out to the sales team, you’ll want to get acquainted with Zendesk pricing. Ultimately, it’s this intelligence that will help you secure the best possible terms for your organization — which will stop you from overpaying for a subscription.
The question is, what will Zendesk cost you? And is there any way to negotiate a discounted rate?
Here’s everything you need to know.
How much does Zendesk cost?
Before we talk about cost-trimming strategies, we need to get to know Zendesk’s pricing model. At the time of writing, Zendesk pricing plans start at $55 per month for the most basic tier of subscription on an annual billing cycle. A free trial is also available.
Other pricing editions offer more advanced functionality and resource allocations up to the enterprise level. Standard pricing is listed on the vendor’s pricing page, but as is the norm with software vendors, enterprise-grade pricing is obscured. Of course, this makes it challenging to know what you’ll end up paying if you’re an organization with particularly advanced usage needs — but if you’re unsure of the plan your business requires, you’ll want to get familiar with all your options.
Let’s take a closer look at the pricing and feature sets offered by each plan.
Zendesk pricing plans
Suite Team
Zendesk Suite Team is the standard pricing tier on offer, costing $55 per agent per month if billed annually or $69 per agent on a monthly basis. This is the recommended plan for smaller teams with basic ticketing, multi-channel support, help center and bot functionality.
Suite Growth
The more advanced Suite Growth plan supports growing teams in their customer support efforts, costing $89 per agent per month annually or $115 per agent billed monthly. As well as supporting the full functionality offered by Suite Team, Suite Growth enables multiple ticket forms, SLAs and a self-service customer portal, among other features.
Suite Professional
Zendesk’s most popular plan is Suite Professional, costing $115 per agent per month billed annually or $149 per agent monthly. This plan supports everything from Suite Growth as well as custom and live analytics, skills-based routing to the most qualified agent, and eligibility for add-ons like Advanced AI.
Suite Enterprise
Zendesk Enterprise is the most comprehensive solution for scaled organizations, supporting Sandbox, AI-powered content cues, content blocks, and further add-on functionality. A Suite Enterprise Plus plan is also available, optimized with Zendesk’s highest API rate limits and enhanced disaster recovery.
But if you’re searching for enterprise-grade Zendesk pricing, you won’t find it on the vendor’s website. Zendesk obscures the price points of its most advanced plans, prompting prospective customers to reach out to the sales team for a tailored quote.
And while this can be beneficial for securing a plan customized to your organization’s needs, it effectively puts you back to square one with trying to find out whether a particular package is within your budget, let alone whether you’re getting a good deal.
So, when it comes to an enterprise-grade Zendesk subscription, how can you find out what you’ll pay?
Search online for pricing information
One strategy is to search online for intel about what other companies are paying for their Zendesk contracts. While your exact cost will depend on your number of users, this can provide a useful ballpark to compare your prospective spending to.
After performing a quick search, we found a PeerSpot thread discussing Zendesk pricing.
One user claimed that their organization was paying $200 per agent per month in 2021 for an Enterprise plan. This figure certainly seems aligned with Zendesk’s other pricing editions, representing a significant price increase over the Suite Professional plan without being too excessive a leap.
Elsewhere, figures in this region are corroborated by reputable sources on SaaS pricing. SaaSworthy, for example, write that Zendesk Enterprise costs $150 per agent per month when billed annually or $199 per agent billed monthly. Similarly, this Geckoboard article says prices start at $169 per agent per month if billed annually and $219 per agent monthly.
However, while this information can certainly provide you with an estimation of Zendesk Enterprise costs, they’re not to be taken as gospel. In many cases, online pricing intelligence grows quickly outdated, and prices even as recently documented as 2021 may not be representative of current-day costs.
In the SaaSworthy article, for example, each standard pricing tier is linked to a slightly inaccurate price. Take the Suite Team cost for instance, which the article claims costs $49 per user per month rather than the official cost of $55.
These small discrepancies might seem insignificant, but when you consider that SaaS prices rise by an average of 12% each year, and that the average organization deploys 130 different software tools, the extra costs could quickly rack up.
So, what’s the alternative?
There is one way of receiving up-to-date, reliable pricing data — and that’s by talking to Vertice. But we’ll come on to that shortly.
Can you get a discount on Zendesk pricing?
SaaS prices are rarely set in stone, so there’s often capacity to negotiate a discount on your recurring fee. In fact, our data shows that Zendesk has a pricing parity score of 34/100, suggesting there is a marked difference between what companies with similar profiles pay for their Zendesk plans — and some may have secured a competitive rate.
But whether or not you’ll secure a discount will come down to the success of your software negotiation strategy.
Here are some useful tactics for productive negotiations.
Give yourself sufficient time
As with any new business deal, you should allow yourself plenty of time to research, plan and negotiate a software purchase. This is especially important to do if you’re procuring a larger contract that could yield substantial savings. Leaving generous lead time ensures you’re adequately prepared with vendor research and price points to barter a good deal.
It also protects you against being backed into a corner. If vendors realize that you’ve left it late to negotiate, they may be less yielding and offer inflexible terms. So, if you have an approaching campaign or product launch that could place pressure on your customer support services, ensure you’ve left adequate time to negotiate in advance and secure the best possible Zendesk deal.
Consider signing up for a longer period
Another strategy that could secure you a discount is committing to a longer subscription term. As we’ve discussed, commitment-based discounts are available to Zendesk customers who sign up for yearly billing rather than monthly. But as well as this, you could even propose a multi-year plan and see further savings.
While not every vendor offers multi-year deals, our data shows that providers tend to offer an average discount of 5% for each extra year that a subscriber commits to. So, if you’ve done your due diligence and identified that Zendesk will make up a mainstay of your SaaS stack, it could pay off to negotiate a longer contract for a lower overall cost.
Partner with a negotiations mediator
Proactively researching, strategizing, and negotiating your software contracts is a fruitful spend management exercise — but it can also be a drain on your time and resources. This is why many organizations choose to collaborate with an experienced third-party mediator to negotiate their contracts.
This is known as shuttle diplomacy — and it’s a SaaS purchasing tactic growing in popularity as companies take on more tools in their digital transformation. It allows businesses to relay queries and proposals to their chosen vendor without direct contact, creating a sense of impartiality that can produce more successful negotiations in this challenging niche.
Negotiate with Vertice’s pricing benchmarks and pay less for SaaS
Each of these software negotiation strategies could help you secure more competitive terms for your Zendesk subscription, as well as the other tools in your portfolio. However, the best form of leverage during software negotiations comes from accurate and reliable pricing data.
And while searching online can give you those all-important ballpark figures, this isn’t the kind of data you can quote when negotiating. Instead, Vertice offers detailed pricing and discounting data from over 16,000 global software providers — Zendesk included. But we don’t just provide you with this data — our experienced SaaS purchasing team are happy to negotiate on your behalf and secure best-in-class terms for your subscription.
Take a look at how one company saved $170,000 on a single SaaS contract with Vertice, or get an idea of how much you could be saving on your annual software spend today.
