20 tickets a week and a day job - is a real helpdesk worth it or is gmail with labels fine

Counterpoint from someone who did move at roughly your volume and does not regret it.

The feature that mattered was not assignment, it was that every conversation is attached to a customer record with their plan and their signup date visible next to the message. I stopped tabbing between the billing dashboard and my inbox for every reply. At 20 tickets a week that is maybe 40 minutes back per week.

The second thing was snoozing. A ticket I cannot answer until the weekend disappears from the list and comes back Saturday morning instead of sitting there generating guilt every time I open my mail.

That said the cheap tier of any of these is fine. Do not buy the tier with the AI agent in it while you have 44 customers.

The line is not ticket volume, it is the number of humans answering. One person with 20 a week does not need shared assignment, collision detection or round robin, which is most of what you are paying for. The day a second person touches the inbox, move.

What you actually need right now is three things and none of them cost money. A dedicated address that does not forward into your personal inbox. Saved replies for the six questions that make up most of your volume. And an autoresponder that tells the truth about your hours.

The autoresponder is the one that fixes the 11pm problem. Mine says: this inbox is checked at 8am and 7pm UK time on weekdays, if the service is down check the status page, otherwise you will get a human reply within one working day. Nobody has ever complained. Several people have said they appreciated knowing.

Do not promise a response time you cannot hit on your worst week. A one hour SLA on a plan page is a promise made by the version of you that has a free Tuesday, and it will be broken by the version of you with a deadline at the day job. Under-promise in writing, over-deliver in practice, and never the other way round.

Tag every ticket for two weeks with one word for what it was about. Do not analyse, just tag. At the end of two weeks the list will be brutally short and the top two will be a third of your volume.

Mine were: where do I find the export button, and why did my card fail. The first was a UI problem I fixed in an hour. The second needed a better dunning email. Together they were about 40% of my inbox, gone permanently. That was worth more than any tool.

Docs deflect, but only if the answer is findable from inside the product at the moment of confusion. A help centre nobody links to is a blog. I put a small link next to each confusing control that goes straight to the relevant paragraph, and support volume for those features dropped noticeably. Not zero. Noticeably.