What a self-hosted support centre actually costs to run

A self-hosted support centre costs nothing to run except your AI account. The repository is free, the hosting is free on plans that allow business use, and the email providers all have a free tier. The only meter running is the one your AI provider bills you for, at well under a penny per reply written.

That is the short answer, and it holds. But "free" hides some real detail, and the detail is where people get caught out three weeks in. Here is every part, what it is actually for, and where the free plan stops.

What do you need before anything works?

Three things, and you already have one of them.

GitHub's free plan includes unlimited private repositories, so nothing here pushes you onto a paid tier. The one number worth knowing is scheduled jobs: a private repository gets 2,000 free minutes of automation a month, where a public one has no limit at all. A support centre's daily jobs use a fraction of that either way.

What you only need if you want the automatic parts

None of these are required. Leave them all out and the support centre still runs completely: feedback arrives, the boards work, the site deploys. It simply does not write or send anything on your behalf.

• An email provider for receipts, reply notifications and shipped notices. Resend's free tier covers 3,000 emails a month, capped at 100 a day, which is more than a normal support centre sends. You do need a domain verified with them.
• A notification webhook so Slack, Discord or anywhere else gets a message the moment something arrives. Free everywhere.
• An AI provider for the first reply, the digest and the changelog. This is the only line that costs.

So what does the AI actually cost?

Less than people expect, because a support reply is a small job. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has a free tier; both bill per token from the first request. On the cheapest current models a short reply comes in around a tenth of a penny, and even on a larger model it stays comfortably under a penny. Anthropic publishes a worked support example on its own pricing page, checked 22 August 2026, putting 10,000 tickets at about $37 on their cheapest current model, which is roughly a third of a penny each before any caching or batch discount.

Put a number on it: a hundred replies a month is somewhere between ten pence and a pound. That is the entire running cost of the support centre.

How does that compare to renting one?

Briefly: the cheapest hosted feature request tools run $264 to $348 a year, and Canny.io's entry tier is $948, checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 20 August 2026. Two of those price by something that grows, so the three-year figure is the one worth looking at rather than the monthly one.

That comparison has a page of its own, with a calculator: what feedback tools actually cost over three years. This page is about the other side of the ledger, which is what it costs to run one yourself.

What happens when you outgrow the free tiers?

Nothing sudden, because none of these are the kind of limit that switches your site off. Resend's free tier is 3,000 emails a month with a daily cap of 100, checked on 21 August 2026. A support centre that sends a receipt, a reply notification and a shipped notice per item would need to be handling a lot of items before that binds, and the paid step above it is small.

GitHub's automation minutes work the same way. A private repository gets a monthly allowance and a public one has no limit, and a support centre's scheduled jobs use a fraction of either.

The AI bill is the only line that scales with use, and it scales with the thing you actually want more of, which is customers writing to you. That is a better shape than a bill that rises because more people voted.

If you are weighing running one yourself against paying somebody, the honest version of that trade is in the guide to self-hosting a feature request board, including the case for not doing it.

Frequently asked questions