Introducing Andrea Helpdesk
Why a small PHP helpdesk — and why now. The short version: SaaS helpdesks tax your growth, and your customer conversations don't belong on someone else's servers.
Every growing support team eventually has the same uncomfortable meeting. The SaaS helpdesk bill has crept past what feels reasonable, the per-agent tier is a round number, and the realisation lands that the data sitting in someone else's database is, arguably, the most sensitive conversation the company has with its customers.
Andrea started as the answer to that meeting.
What it is
Andrea Helpdesk is a self-hosted customer support platform. It's a single PHP 8.1 application, a MySQL 8 database, a Bootstrap 5 agent UI, and a magic-link customer portal. It handles tickets, email threading over IMAP, SLA escalations, a knowledge base, attachments, internal notes, @mentions, Slack webhooks, browser notifications, per-agent signatures, bulk CSV customer import, and an in-app updater.
What it doesn't have:
- A per-agent price.
- A per-ticket price.
- A feature-gated free tier.
- A marketplace full of half-working third-party plugins.
- An AI upsell strip in the sidebar.
It's GPL-3.0. You run it on your own server, on any LAMP-ish hosting, and it stays yours.
Why self-host
Three reasons, really.
Your tickets contain the things you'd least like to leak. Billing disputes, account lockouts, legal threats, internal escalations. The argument for self-hosting support data is much stronger than the one for self-hosting, say, a todo list.
Per-agent pricing punishes the thing you want to do. The point of a support team is to hire more support people. Anything priced in agent-seats is, structurally, a tax on doing your job better.
Most SaaS helpdesks are doing less than you think. Once you strip away the onboarding videos and the “enterprise-ready” badges, a helpdesk is a PHP-and-database-shaped problem from 2008. Andrea embraces that.
What's next
The immediate roadmap is unglamorous: tighter knowledge-base search, a handful of admin quality-of-life improvements, and a public docs site at docs.andreahelpdesk.com.
There's no premium tier. If one ever arrives, it'll be an add-on service — not a feature carve-out. The code you see today is the code that stays free.
If you end up deploying Andrea — or breaking it in an interesting way — open an issue on GitHub. We'd love to hear from you.