Why is Zendesk pulling the plug on its ‘Inbox’ product?
By MixDex Article may include affiliate links
Zendesk is shuttering its “Inbox” service.
- Inbox, which is a free, simplified, “collaborative email inbox” service, will be shut down July 8, 2019.
- When it was released, the effort may have been Zendesk’s effort to dip its toe in the “freemium” model.
- By offering the service for free, Zendesk presumably was looking to draw interest from businesses, including Shopify stores, who were just getting started — with the hopes of transitioning them to a paid version of Zendesk later.
- “We released Inbox in 2014, and over time, we’ve been able to learn more about how teams are using it. As part of our research, we found that teams using Inbox for email communication were also using other software to manage customer support from multiple channels,” reads a post from Zendesk about the shutdown.
- “To allow agents to provide integrated customer support, we decided to end support for our standalone Inbox product, and help our users transition to our flagship product, Zendesk Support,” the post continues.
- Zendesk’s very basic paid plan starts at $5 per user per month ($60 a year) but the next plan up jumps to $19 per user per month ($228 per year) with prepayment.
- Zendesk will no longer offer updates to the Inbox product starting Feb. 5, 2019, other than critical fixes.
- That date is also the date Zendesk will stop providing support for the product, except for users looking to migrate to the company’s paid offering.