When we designed OperonITSM's pricing model, we made a deliberate choice that goes against almost every other ITSM tool on the market. We charge per company, not per agent. It sounds simple. The implications are significant.
How per-agent pricing works — and why it hurts
Every major ITSM platform charges you based on the number of agents using the system. Freshdesk starts at £44 per agent per month on their Growth plan. Zendesk Suite is around £55. Jira Service Management is £17.65 on Standard. Those numbers look manageable when you're a team of three.
The problem is that IT teams grow. And they don't grow predictably. You add a contractor for a migration project. You hire two support staff over the summer. You onboard a new developer who needs to raise change requests. Before you know it, you're paying for 20 agents and wondering why your ITSM bill doubled in eighteen months.
| Team size | Freshdesk Growth | Zendesk Suite | OperonITSM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 agents | £2,640/yr | £3,300/yr | £1,000/yr |
| 10 agents | £5,280/yr | £6,600/yr | £1,000/yr |
| 25 agents | £13,200/yr | £16,500/yr | £1,000/yr |
| 50 agents | £26,400/yr | £33,000/yr | £1,000/yr |
The hidden cost of per-agent pricing
The financial hit is obvious. What's less discussed is the behavioural change it forces. When every user costs money, you start making decisions that aren't good for your operation.
You give read-only access to managers who should be full participants. You hesitate before adding a contractor. You keep ex-employees active because disabling them doesn't reduce the bill until renewal. You underprovision access to avoid triggering a tier increase.
None of these are good IT practice. They're all direct consequences of per-agent pricing.
The best tool is one your whole team actually uses. Per-agent pricing punishes adoption.
Why flat pricing makes sense for operations tools
ITSM tools aren't like CRM or marketing platforms where usage directly correlates with revenue generated. A helpdesk ticket doesn't make you money — it costs you time to resolve. A change request isn't a sale — it's a risk to manage. Project tasks don't generate revenue — they consume it.
Charging per agent on operational tooling is a fundamentally misaligned model. It penalises the very behaviour you want to encourage: getting your whole team onto a unified platform so nothing falls through the cracks.
What flat pricing means in practice
With OperonITSM at £1,000 per year, you get unlimited agents. Add your whole IT team, your managers, your read-only stakeholders, your contractors. Create viewer accounts for executives who want visibility. Give agent access to everyone who raises tickets. None of it costs extra.
You also get all six modules — Help Desk, Project Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Systems Inventory and Service Catalogue — in that single price. With per-agent platforms, those are often separate tiers or add-ons.
Self-hosted means the price is the price
OperonITSM runs on your server. There's no usage-based overage, no API call limits, no storage tiers, no premium support packages. The £1,000 annual licence is the entirety of what you pay us. Your hosting costs are yours, as they should be.
We think that's the honest way to price a tool that's supposed to make your IT operation run better — not a model designed to extract more money as your organisation grows.