Front, Gmelius, Hiver and Missive, and What the Entry Tier Withholds

You stop looking at the seat rate and read what the entry tier withholds, because that is where they diverge. Front’s cheapest plan gives you one channel type. Gmelius requires everyone to be on Gmail or Google Workspace. Hiver’s entry plan allows two shared inboxes and ten users and sells seats in blocks of five. Missive’s first tier has no rules, no integrations and no API. So write down four of your own facts before opening anybody’s pricing page: how many people will be in the inbox in a year, how many channels you actually need, whether your company is on Google or Microsoft, and whether you need automation on day one or can live without it. Those four decide which of these treats you fairly. None of the four will do that arithmetic for you, and for most of them the honest result is one that costs them a customer.

Almost never at the point of purchase. Nearly always about eleven months later. The tool gets chosen carefully, set up well by somebody who cared, and then belongs to nobody. The rules still route by a team structure that was reorganized in spring, a label invented for a single campaign is now attached to six hundred threads, two shared inboxes exist because somebody could not find the first one, and the round robin still includes a person who left. Nothing failed. It simply stopped being anybody’s job.

You do, completely. The Zoho TeamInbox subscription is bought by you, in your name, and paid to Zoho directly. We work inside it as administrators and never sit between you and your own account. Stop working with us tomorrow and the conversations, rules, tags and full history all remain untouched. The only exception anywhere on our list is Zoho Assist, where the license sits with us instead of you.

A good number of teams would be, and far better to read it on this page than discover it once a contract is signed. If four of you share one address and the whole thing fits in your heads, Missive Starter at fourteen dollars a seat is the right answer and we are not. If you already have an operations person who owns the routing and revisits it unprompted, Front or Hiver plus that person will beat any retainer. It starts being worth paying for on the day no one on the premises can say who last touched an assignment rule.

That turns on your headcount more than anything else, and the method is more use to you than a verdict. Under five people: Missive Starter at fourteen dollars a seat is very hard to beat, and four seats comes to fifty six dollars a month. On Google Workspace with a lot of shared addresses: Gmelius Growth gives unlimited shared inboxes at twenty five where Hiver Growth gives two. Needing more than one channel from day one: Front Starter cannot do it at all, so Professional at sixty five is your real entry price. Growing past ten people: Front Starter and Hiver Growth both stop there, so price the tier above the one you are reading. And against a team of four, Missive beats us by roughly nine to one, which we will say on the phone as readily as we say it here.

Nobody is alerted, and that is exactly what makes it hard to catch, because a shared inbox in decline never once reports a fault. No support tier covers this either. Hiver puts round the clock email and chat support on every plan. Front runs support across its plans and sells onboarding packages on top. All of it helps your team run the software, which is a different question entirely from whether anyone will warn you that the software has stopped describing the team it was built around. With us, reading the response time reporting on a fixed cycle is inside the fee, which puts the noticing on our side of the line.

No, and teams that phase it settle faster than the ones that switch everything over on a single Monday. What usually works is to start with the address carrying the most traffic, then anything attached to a live campaign, then the quiet aliases nobody has checked in months. Nearly all the volume sits in that first group and nearly all the cleanup sits in the last, and a fair number of those quiet aliases prove not to need a home anywhere.

Yes, though in practice it becomes a rebuild rather than a clean up. We go through what is currently configured, surface the three rules that overlap and the one that has been failing quietly, find the tags that mean the same thing under two names, and decide which routing wins wherever they conflict. That last part is normally the bulk of the work. An inherited setup will tell you precisely what came in and nothing whatsoever about why any of it was routed the way it was.

Four to six weeks covers most of them, and it runs longer wherever the team is mid reorganization and nobody can yet say who owns what. Configuring Zoho TeamInbox itself takes days. What consumes the calendar is agreeing who actually answers which kind of message, building routing that reflects that rather than the org chart, and then the first month of live mail, which has to run through a full cycle before anyone calls it finished.

Quite possibly nothing, and arriving at that on a first call suits us perfectly well. Anyone who truly owns it will outperform a retainer every time, since they are in the queue daily and know which threads carry weight. The only real question is whether it is genuinely on their list. Reviewing assignment rules during a quarter when every message got answered and no one complained is precisely the task that keeps looking safe to push to the next quarter, and then the one after that.

Two situations, and both arrive often enough that the answer is ready before the question finishes. If you are a handful of people sharing one address and the operation genuinely fits in your own heads, Missive will do it for the price of a lunch and the money belongs elsewhere. And if you are running a real support function with an operations lead already on the payroll, Front and your own team will beat us, and we would rather tell you that on the first call than after paperwork exists.

We will tell you so before any invoice is raised, since flushing that out is what the fit review is for. Often the real problem is that nobody has agreed what a reasonable reply time actually is, or that two teams each believe the other one owns a category, or that the volume is high because a page elsewhere on the site is confusing people. Those are worth facing first, and no amount of routing touches any of them.

Five hundred dollars a month, per organization. The figure is published on the Managed Zoho TeamInbox service page, and it holds regardless of headcount, channel count or message volume. The Zoho TeamInbox license is bought from Zoho and held in your own name.

Thirty days’ notice and we are done. Nothing moves, because the subscription was always yours. The administrator seat reverts to you, and we leave behind a written account of what each inbox and rule is for and why the routing is shaped as it is, so nobody has to work it out backwards. We also list what we would have tackled next.

The addresses you want shared and roughly what arrives at each, who currently answers what and who is meant to, your present tool bill and which tier you are on, and an honest account of which categories keep going wrong. Both of those lists always turn up half finished, which is entirely normal. They give us the shape of the problem, and the fit review fills in the rest.