Sorry. We messed up.

We’ve spent the last two and a half years building this company by putting our customers first and meeting their needs. When we decided to make a change to the Zendesk pricing structure for our existing customers, we tried to be as thoughtful, transparent, and straightforward as possible. We failed. We let you down. And we apologize.

We have received a lot of feedback from our very passionate customers since these changes were first announced. We have spent the last 48 hours answering questions on our support forum, on the phone, and in person. We have also been reaching out to our customers to truly understand the heart of why you are upset.

As a result, we will be grandfathering pricing to all of our existing customers — without a time limit. For the same price you’ve always paid, you will receive the same functionality that you had in the past, in addition to the new community support and knowledge base features we announced on Tuesday. No further action is needed. Period.

And for those customers who took action this week to convert to an extended billing cycle, please contact us if you would like to revert back to the billing cycle that you held as of Monday.

When we made the pricing changes, our intent was truly to give you more features and functionality at a good price. This is particularly true for the new Starter plan, which we thought would be a great alternative to the smallest of our Regular plan customers and an opportunity to move to a lower price offering. We also believed our customers would look at the new community support and knowledge base features, which are the most requested features ever, and see it as a whole new product offering.

We missed the mark. Instead of our intended result, many of you read my Tuesday e-mail and thought, “You want to send me a big bill for something that I didn’t order and haven’t agreed to?  WTF?”  Today, I hope to express that we hear you, we understand, and we will always listen to our customers. We will also continue to invest in product innovation over the years to come, and we will remain committed to offering both the best product and the best value for all of the additional functionality we roll out in the future.

Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad that we got to hear you. It’s an important reminder. And let me reiterate: we will always listen to you. You are the reason we exist.

I will be heading off to New York for our customer meet up today (Thursday 5/20) at 6-8:30 pm EDT at SoHo Park Cafe. I’ll be there with a few others from Zendesk, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mikkel

@mikkelsvane

P.S. Please give us at least a day to update all of our support documents (FAQs, blog posts, etc.) and your feature sets to be in sync with this.