Show HN: Libredesk – Open-source customer support desk. Single binary app
20 comments
·February 24, 2025duckb
Looks beautiful. How difficult would it be if I want to develop a plugin - Mood detection, Chat Helper (LLM linked), ...
nh2
Looks great!
It seems to be email only so far. Do you plan to add chat, like Intercom and Chatwoot have it?
pentacent_hq
Great job, that's looking very nice and polished already! Are you also planning to introduce a SaaS version of it?
avr5500
No plans, cloud deployment platforms like Railway can take of it
nh2
How do you plan to fund the development, if at all?
For a project like this, a hosted version might be a nice idea if you eventually want to do something else than putting your free time into support and maintenance. And many users will appreciate that the hosted version takes care of DB migration and backups for them.
A hosted version need not necessarily target maximum money making. You could run it as a nonprofit whose goal is to ensure that the open-source project works well and lives long.
grzaks
Excellent! I was looking for a lightweight OSS alternative to Freshdesk/Zendesk and, honestly, didn’t find any worth deploying. Yours looks very promising, and we’ll definitely assess it.
teruakohatu
When I last looked, I couldn't find any truely open source solutions that could practically replace even a shared inbox. This looks like it could. Well done to the developer.
And the paid options had high costs even on the most basic plans.
potamic
Who are your target users? Why not use an embedded db like sqlite and make it truly "single binary"?
mofirouz
It would be wonderful if it could be used as a ticketing solution where the ticket could have severity. So customers could login to create a ticket as part of their org.
Also data sources from either third party in-house database or something HubSpot would be great!
techn00
I love single binary apps, easy to deploy.
d1sxeyes
Looks great!
Mobile experience is not great but I think it’s sensible not to focus on that yet, the number of users doing customer support from a mobile phone is pretty small, even the big players in this space like ServiceNow etc have suboptimal mobile experiences.
Do you have any plans on how to monetise this or is this a labour of love?
avr5500
Mobile is not the focus, it can be done later as an app or something else. No plans to monetize; yes, it's a labor of love.
d1sxeyes
Lack of a monetisation strategy is a concern for folks who might worry that you end up running out of time/motivation to work on it, which might be a roadblock to wide adoption
That said, if you're only in it for the joy of creating something amazing, and don't really worry about whether you'll be able to keep maintaining it indefinitely, then keep it up!
truepath_app
I might be missing something obvious, but how does a customer file a ticket/request?
avr5500
Right now the only way to create a ticket/request is by adding an inbox, and sending an email to your configured email address.
oever
Does it support the scenario where part of the team is only on IMAP?
Aeolun
Haven’t really seen anything else but it certainly loads fast!
Libredesk is a 100% free and open-source customer support desk, the backend is written in Go and the frontend is in Vue JS with ShadnCN for UI components.
Unlike many "open-core" alternatives that lock essential features behind enterprise plans, Libredesk is fully open-source and plans to always stay this way.
It's in alpha (v0.1.0) right now, but there’s a working demo available. I built this because I wanted a truly open and self-hosted alternative to platforms like Chatwoot, Intercom, and Zendesk.
Would love feedback, suggestions, and thoughts from the community.
GitHub: https://github.com/abhinavxd/libredesk
Demo: https://demo.libredesk.io/