Helpdesk and support inbox
What it costs to self-host FreeScout
FreeScout — Free self-hosted omnichannel AI-powered helpdesk & shared mailbox Below is the server it needs at each team size, what that costs, and how long the 1 commercial product it replaces would take to cost more.
| Team size | Memory | Disk | Cheapest plan that fits | Server | With backups and your time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | 1.3 GB | 10.3 GB | Basic 2 GiB · DigitalOcean | $12.00 | $51.90 |
| 5 people | 1.3 GB | 11.5 GB | Basic 2 GiB · DigitalOcean | $12.00 | $51.90 |
| 10 people | 1.4 GB | 13 GB | Basic 2 GiB · DigitalOcean | $12.00 | $51.90 |
| 25 people | 1.5 GB | 17.5 GB | Basic 2 GiB · DigitalOcean | $12.00 | $51.90 |
| 50 people | 1.7 GB | 25 GB | Basic 2 GiB · DigitalOcean | $12.00 | $51.90 |
| 100 people | 2.2 GB | 40 GB | Basic 4 GiB · DigitalOcean | $24.00 | $66.30 |
| 250 people | 3.7 GB | 85 GB | Basic 8 GiB · DigitalOcean | $48.00 | $95.10 |
The sizing model for FreeScout
Laravel and MySQL. A shared mailbox rather than a full support suite, which is exactly what most small teams are overpaying Zendesk for.
- 1 GB of memory for the whole stack at rest, every container the project ships included.
- 8 MB more per active user, then 25% on top so the box is not running at its ceiling.
- 10 GB of disk to begin with, growing 0.3 GB per user.
- 1 vCPU. Carried through from the project's baseline and not scaled with team size, because for this workload memory is what runs out first.
The base figures are our estimate, derived from the services in the project's reference Docker Compose file, because it does not publish a minimum specification we could cite. The per-user increments are ours in every case. They are deliberately generous rather than optimistic: a comparison that undersizes the server flatters self-hosting.
Time, not just money
FreeScout is rated easy to operate, which in this model means about 2 hours to get it running properly the first time and 0.5 hours a month after that. At $75 an hour that is $150 once and $37.50 a month, which is usually the largest line in the whole calculation. This one is about as light as self-hosting gets: a single container and little to do beyond keeping the image current.
What it replaces
| Commercial product | Its cost at 10 people | FreeScout at 10 people | Break-even | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk Suite Team | $638 | $51.90 | under a month | full breakdown |
Where to put FreeScout
1.4 GB of memory and 13 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Basic 2 GiB at DigitalOcean for $12.00 a month.
Go to DigitalOcean Compare hosts
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The DigitalOcean link above is a referral link: if you sign up through it and pay your first $25, we receive $25 of DigitalOcean account credit. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
Project facts
| Licence | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | PHP |
| GitHub stars | 4,532 |
| Open issues | 24 |
| Latest release | 1.8.240 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Repository checked | 2026-09-12 |
| Project | freescout.net · freescout-help-desk/freescout |