SupportLayer

Your first agent is free — forever, on every feature

Every ticket has an owner.
Every clock tells the truth.

SupportLayer is a helpdesk for teams who are measured on their SLAs. Clear ownership, a clock that pauses when the ball is in the customer’s court, and roles that fit a one-person function or a fifty-agent floor.

Create your workspace See what it costs

No card. No sales call. Live in under two minutes.

Included on every account, from the free seat upwards

Email-to-ticket Pausing SLA clocks MFA enforcement Role-based access SLA reporting REST API

What SupportLayer does

Four jobs, done properly

Not a platform you configure for a quarter. A helpdesk that arrives with sensible defaults and gets out of your way.

Show the queue

Open work, breached clocks, unassigned tickets and today’s resolutions on one screen. Nothing to dig for.

Keep time honestly

The clock runs while the work is yours and stops while you wait on the customer. Your numbers reflect effort.

Fit the team

End users, agents, managers, admins. Each role sees exactly its own slice — no oversharing, no guesswork.

Catch every channel

Forward your inbox, drop in the chat widget, or post to the API. It all lands in the same queue.

The SLA clock

Stop being penalised for waiting

Most helpdesks measure calendar time. If a customer takes three days to send you a screenshot, that’s three days against your resolution target — and a breach you had no way to avoid.

SupportLayer holds the clock the moment a ticket moves to on hold or with client, and restarts it when they come back. Your compliance rate ends up measuring your team, not your customers’ inboxes.

  • Separate response and resolution targets, set per priority
  • Warning emails before a breach, not a post-mortem after one
  • Every pause recorded on the ticket, so the maths is auditable
Ticket #1043 8-hour resolution target
2h 10m
Held — waiting on customer
3h 15m
Raised 09:04Resolved next day, 14:22
29h 18mCALENDAR TIME
is what other tools would report
5h 25mSLA TIME USED

Roles and seats

You only pay for the people working the queue

Support agents and service managers take a seat. Administrators and end users don’t — they’re unlimited and free on every account, however many of them you have.

That means you can put your whole customer base, your finance team and your ops leads inside SupportLayer without watching the bill climb. Invite them, give them a role, and each one sees precisely the slice of the workspace their job needs.

See how seats are counted
SA Support agentWorks assigned tickets, replies, sets status TAKES A SEAT
SM Service managerAssigns work, sets SLAs, reads every report TAKES A SEAT
AD AdministratorBranding, users, API keys, security policy FREE
EU End userRaises tickets, tracks their own history FREE
$12
Per agent seat, per month. The only number on the invoice.
First seat free
Permanently, with every feature switched on.
500+
Agents a single workspace runs comfortably.
No add-ons
Chat, API and SLAs are in the box, not sold beside it.

The full list

Everything your team needs, nothing they don’t

Every item below is on every account, including the free one. There is no upgrade path because there is nothing to upgrade to.

Live dashboard

Open, unassigned, breached and resolved-today, refreshed as the queue moves.

Pausing SLAs

Targets per priority, clocks that hold while you wait, warnings before a breach.

Role-based access

Four roles out of the box, plus access groups when you need something narrower.

Email-to-ticket

Forward your support inbox. Replies thread straight back to the sender.

Live chat widget

One script tag on your site. Conversations arrive in the same queue as everything else.

Reply templates

Saved answers for the questions you get weekly. Insert, adjust, send.

SLA reporting

Compliance rate, first response, volume and workload per agent. No exports required.

Security controls

Org-wide MFA enforcement, verified email, scoped permissions, private attachments.

White-label branding

Your logo and colours, so customers see your workspace rather than ours.

ProjectLayer sync

Turn a ticket into a backlog item in one click, and keep the link between them.

Bulk actions

Filter, select, then close or reassign the lot. Useful after an outage.

Agent notifications

Assignments, replies and SLA warnings, without anyone refreshing a dashboard.

Pricing

One price, and it buys everything

Pay for the agents working the queue. Everyone else is free.

EVERYTHING INCLUDED
$12
per agent seat, per month
Your first agent seat is always free — not a trial, not time-limited.
Shown in US dollars. GBP EUR USD AUD NZD
  • Tickets, SLAs and attachments
  • Dashboard and reporting
  • Reply templates
  • Custom branding
  • Role-based permissions
  • MFA enforcement
  • REST API access
  • Live chat widget
  • Email-to-ticket channel
  • Agent notifications
  • ProjectLayer integration
  • Room for 500+ agents
Start with the free seat

Add seats from your account settings whenever you need them; billing adjusts pro rata. Administrators and end users stay unlimited and free.

Compare

What the others charge extra for

Plan names and prices taken from each vendor’s own published pricing pages.

SupportLayerfrom $12 / agent FreshdeskPro, $55 / agent / mo annual ZendeskSuite + Copilot Pro, £125 / agent / mo annual Help ScoutStandard, $25 / user / mo annual
SLA management
SLA policiesIncluded
SLA clock pauses while waitingIncludedNot offered
Access and security
Custom user permissionsIncluded
Productivity
Reply templatesIncludedIncludedIncludedIncluded
Live chat widgetIncludedIncludedIncluded
Email-to-ticketIncludedIncludedIncludedIncluded
Bulk actionsIncludedIncludedIncludedIncluded
Setup and scale
Free planFirst agent, alwaysNot offered5 users, 1 inbox
REST APIIncludedIncludedIncluded

Competitor pricing and plan availability cited from each vendor’s own pricing or help-centre pages, captured May 2026 — freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing, zendesk.co.uk/pricing, helpscout.com/pricing. Row-level sources are listed on the individual comparison pages.

Questions

The things people ask before signing up

Support agents and service managers count towards your seats. Administrators and end users are unlimited and free on every account, so you can invite your whole customer base without the bill moving.

No. Plenty of teams run internal IT helpdesks, operations desks and facilities requests on it. If you have a queue of requests and someone is measuring how fast you close them, it fits.

The clock starts when the ticket is raised and counts against your response and resolution targets. Moving the ticket to “on hold” or “with client” pauses it; returning it to an active status starts it again. Every pause is recorded on the ticket, so the total is auditable.

Yes. An administrator can enforce it for the whole organisation. Once it is on, every user must complete multi-factor setup before they can reach the workspace again.

It is. Every feature is on every account, including the free first agent. There are no feature gates at any level.

Set up forwarding from your support address and each incoming email becomes a ticket. Agent replies thread back into the original sender’s inbox.

Yes, a full REST API on every plan. Use it to connect existing tools, build workflows, or pull data into your own reporting. The API documentation covers the endpoints.

Add seats from account settings at any point and billing adjusts pro rata. No sales call. Workspaces run comfortably past 500 agents.

Give your team a queue they can trust

Create a workspace in under two minutes. No card, no consultants, no migration project.

Create your workspace Talk to us first