

Show HN: Open-source email helpdesk - frenkel
http://github.com/ivaldi/brimir
We&#x27;ve tried systems like OSTicket, OTRS etc, but never found anything to our liking. Most systems were cluttered, slow or too advanced. Brimir is simple but usefull.
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redox_
Any chance you could setup a demo or provide some screenshots ?

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w0rd-driven
This is my request as well. A demo or screenshots go a long way to promote
something like this. A lot of helpdesk apps are alike so showing your
uniqueness is key at this stage.

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zaroth
Self hosting is a huge benefit I think for these systems. I'd love to see you
charging for the self-hosted version. Just because it's open source doesn't
mean you can't charge for it.

Will some people dig into the source and find a way to pay you nothing?
Certainly. But how many people will pay if your default setup screens ask them
to and makes it dead simple? Hosting the service is basically free for the
resources this is going to consume. Most of your costs are probably
development and bugfixing, right? So aren't you giving away the farm?

Making it ridiculously easy to set this up while self hosting shouldn't
decimate your bottom line. Adding some monthly or annual license for the self-
hosted version shouldn't dissuade strangers from submitting pull requests. The
world would be a better place if more SaaS companies could demonstrate it's
possible to drive revenue even in a self-hosted and open source model.

I don't really know if it would work, but it would fun to see you try, and
write-up the experience so we can follow along!

Without seeing screenshots it's hard to know the right price, but I would
guess at least $49 - $79/year. Or just put a slider with a recommended default
payment based on the number of support tickets in the DB and see what happens.

Fanatical support is such a cornerstone of startup culture, if your product
moves the needle on "happier customers for each support manhour" it's worth
$1000s even for a small business with just a single full-time support person
on staff.

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yebyen
Have you heard of elivecd?

This has nothing to do with helpdesk software (it's a distribution of
Debian+E17), but this was the first open source project that I ever saw that
successfully got me to pull out my (paypal) wallet and fork over, similar to
what you're describing.

The distribution comes in the form of a livecd which you can install "only
with the help of the installer module" which I have not seen in any
repository, but everything else is certainly open source. Historically the dev
images have always come with free installer modules.

Of course being a livecd, you are free to use it without installing as long as
you don't mind losing everything you've done each time you reboot. It may have
also been the first livecd to enable a copy-on-write union filesystem (ram or
on a USB stick) so that you could write into your home directory or really
anywhere at all on the filesystem (apt-get install) without modifying the
system image.

Thanatermesis only charged for the installer modules for stable releases,
which to my knowledge started at 2.0 (debian lenny) and was supposed to get a
new release for wheezy. But again, to my knowledge, no installer modules have
been distributed for the new beta; they have spent more cycles on the new
version of the website (which is finally looking mighty good today!)

[http://www.elivecd.org](http://www.elivecd.org)

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yebyen
I just tried the latest beta release, 2.1.56, it's pretty nice

Compared to compiling Enlightenment for yourself, it's really a breeze... most
of what the installer module had to do was copy the rootfs to a live
filesystem, but anyone on hackernews can probably do that.

Historically elive has been very good at having drivers pre-installed as well,
but this round I lucked out... I think without the installer module, any
closed-source drivers are not included; well my laptop only has intel hardware
anyway.

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Daviey
For comparrsion, I've been using django-helpdesk which has been pretty solid
since deployed end of 2008.

[https://github.com/RossP/django-helpdesk/](https://github.com/RossP/django-
helpdesk/)

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ericcholis
I've been comparing services in this space for a bit, and I've always felt
unsure of inserting this into our CS workflow.

One immediate question that comes to mind is, how well does this support
something like eBay's email support system? I know that Zen Desk was
inconsistent with these emails:
[https://support.zendesk.com/entries/21305048-eBay-
integratio...](https://support.zendesk.com/entries/21305048-eBay-integration)

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frenkel
Thanks for the reply! Clean and simple is what we aim for. Maybe we will add
plugin support, but the base system should work stand-alone.

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joshcrowder
I like the idea - Would be good to see integration with Google Apps. I'd be
interested in helping out!

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frenkel
Great idea! What kind of integration do you mean?

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silasb
Google Apps Login integration is one.

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codelust
Even better, integrate it with the top five CRM/ERP solutions.

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frenkel
We've updated the website with some screenshots:
[http://getbrimir.com/](http://getbrimir.com/)

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danecjensen
I've wanted to build something like this for a while. Kudos.

