Why we made DeskTrust Connect free — and what it means for your bill
By The DeskTrust Team
When we started building DeskTrust Connect, the plan was to charge $12 per user per month as an add-on. Reasonable pricing. Half of Zoom, a fifth of TeamViewer. The math worked.
Then we did the customer-facing math from the other direction.
The stack we\'re trying to replace
- Slack Pro — $8.75 per user per month
- Zoom Pro — $15 per user per month
- TeamViewer Business — ~$50 per named user per month (small-team pricing)
- File sharing on top of a cloud drive — variable
For a 20-person team, that\'s over $12,000 a year on collaboration tools, plus three vendor contracts, three onboarding flows, and three admin panels.
The right positioning for Connect wasn\'t "$12 saves you $50." It was "$0 saves you $70."
Why we can afford to make it free
We\'re not a comms company. DeskTrust\'s core product — screenshots, activity, timesheets, AI summaries — is what pays the bills. Connect is infrastructure built on top of gear we already run (a VPS, a Node process, some open-source WebRTC). The marginal cost of running Connect for a customer already paying for DeskTrust is close to zero, especially with WebRTC media flowing peer-to-peer where possible.
Charging on top of that would be a small revenue lift but a much bigger conversion cost. When you\'re asking a prospect to consolidate three vendors, adding a fourth line item defeats the pitch.
What "free" actually means
- Any paid DeskTrust plan — Starter, Growth, or Enterprise — includes all of Connect at no additional cost.
- Free-tier DeskTrust still gets Connect chat and 1:1 calls. Group calls above 2 people, screen viewing, and recording are unlocked on paid tiers because they cost real server compute.
- There\'s no trial, no upgrade path, no seats limit different from your monitoring seats. Every DeskTrust user is a Connect user.
What if we didn\'t build Connect and just partnered with Zoom?
Considered it. Two problems: (1) we couldn\'t make the audit story work end-to-end without owning the pipeline, and (2) consent-first screen viewing is not a feature Zoom or anyone else offers — and it\'s the one our compliance-heavy customers actually need.
So we built it. And made it free. If that changes your math, tell your CFO.