200 customers, about 11 support emails a week — at what point does plain gmail stop working

Whatever you use, get the saved replies out of a text file and into something with variables. Eleven a week is over five hundred a year and my guess is four topics cover most of them. Write the four properly, once, with the links, and you will answer faster and better than you do now.

The second thing worth doing at your size: every time you write the same answer for the third time, that is a documentation page. My ticket volume per customer has roughly halved over two years purely from that habit.

The trigger is not volume, it is one of these three: a second person needs to answer, you need to see everything a customer has ever said in one place, or you have promised someone a response time you now have to prove you met.

Eleven a week with one person hits none of those, so you do not need a help desk. What you need is to fix the two failures you described. Answering twice is solved by a rule that moves anything replied-to out of the inbox. Losing a thread under billing noise is solved by never letting billing notifications into the same inbox as humans — separate address, separate filter, done.

Fix those two this afternoon with filters and revisit in six months.

Contrarian view: I moved at roughly your volume and moved back. The tool added a portal, a ticket number, and a signature block, and my replies started reading like a company instead of a person. Two customers commented on it, neither positively.

At eleven a week, being a human who replies from a real address is a competitive advantage. What I kept was the discipline, not the software: one address, filters, a snippets file, and a weekly ten minute sweep for anything unanswered.

Rough shape of the market, because the numbers are less scary than the ones you have seen. Support-focused tools tend to sit around the mid-twenties per user per month at the entry tier with a discount for annual, some have a free tier that covers a handful of users, and there are flat-priced products that charge per workspace rather than per seat which are cheaper for a solo person than any per-seat pricing.

That said, everyone's plans and add-on pricing move around constantly, particularly with AI features billed separately per resolution, so price it yourself the week you decide. The thing to look for is whether the entry plan actually includes the feature you are moving for, because saved replies and history are sometimes above the cheapest line.

One risk with the forwarding setup specifically that people find out about the hard way: replies going out from your personal address means your personal address is now the support address for anyone who hits reply, forever, including after you hire someone or sell the product. Set the sending identity to the support address now while it is a two minute change.

Move when a second person answers email. Not before. Everything else is a filter you have not written.