I've wasted quite a bit of money on help desk startups here at appsumo. I just can't bring myself to spend the large monthly fee for one. I've experienced problems ranging from the inability to use inline images, to systems going down and being unable to access my tickets. I was on the verge of just making my own when this deal came up.

Thrivedesk has pretty much everything I could ask for. My use case is almost entirely email based, so that's what I'm using it for. I love the UI, its super snappy and easy. The automations are really flexible. The platform is clearly mature, and i had a question and support seems responsive. They have some really innovative integrations, beyond what you often see. I was surprised to see stripe in there, and within minutes all of my tickets have their relevant stripe subscriptions associated with them. really impressive. their wordpress integration also seems to be much more than i expected. overall, I'm impressed.

Other things i was looking for that I noticed many others missed: inline images. they can do it. replies come in as email threads in inboxes like gmail. yep.

I have only a few relatively small gripes:
1. no custom statuses. The only available statuses are open, pending, or closed. Other systems have let me use custom ones which i find helpful in our workflow. It's sort of a small thing for me though, I can get by with tags and automations.

2. i think the workflow automation stuff might be a bit buggy. I made one to add a note after an hour of inactivity. it didn't work. I hope support will get that sorted for me. I tried a different one to unassign the assigned teammate under other conditions, but it actually wouldn't let me save that automation. i think its just a bug. I'm fairly confident support will get these sorted for me, I'll report back if they don't.

3. they have a pretty extensive api (which is great), but as far as I can tell, there's no direct way to query all conversations, like get all conversations, or get all by date. (if im wrong please correct me!) The best i can figure out is first get all contacts, then loop over each contact to get all conversations for each contact. I just want to get a daily chat alert on how many open, pending, and closed tickets we have, maybe also breaking them up by priority, and/or certain tags. Seems like its possible, but maybe not as easy as I would have expected. their api documentation could also use just a bit of improvement, it's not always clear what each endpoint does, or what response it would provide. on the other hand they offer a pre-made postman documentation system which makes it stupidly easily to experiment. it's actually incredibly nice to have that all built. notion does the same thing and i think everyone should. really im just nit-picking here now, its fine and more than many others even have to begin with.

4. they have a rather interesting "custom app" integration where you can query outside APIs to pull in ticket or contact specific information to display alongside relevant tickets. it's a really impressive concept. the fact that they even have that is astounding. that said, i'm unable to get it to work. I tried to query a notion database. I know the request should work, it works in post man, but it doesn't work in their tool. I can't see the response error, so it's hard to know whats going on. So it could be a bit better at showing responses. At some point I'll contact support about it, I'm sure they will be able to help.

Like I said, all of these are relatively small. #3 & #4 are only there because they have features that others don't in the first place. ultimately, i couldn't be happier they are on appsumo. 5 tacos all day.