Savings calculator

The help center isn’t the cost. Keeping it true is.

Every release breaks an article, and someone has to fix it. Set your numbers.

Keeping docs true

Hours a month on docs today

hours

What an hour of that costs

$ an hour

Support

Tickets a month

tickets

What one ticket costs you

$ SaaS runs $25-$35

Answered by the help center 40%

30% 60%

Hours back 16 hours a month

Of the 20 a month you spend now. Fern drafts the change, you approve it.

The money, every year

Upkeep you stop paying for 16 hours a month × $47 × 12: $9,024
Tickets you stop answering 200 deflected a month × $30 × 12: $72,000
Ferndesk Pro Billed yearly, two months free: −$1,490
Net, every year: $79,534

Or $6,603 a month, billed monthly. Pro pays for itself on 5 deflected tickets a month.

Where the number comes from

We don’t guess the hours. We measure them.

Every change Fern publishes is scored for the writing time it replaced: the words written and changed, at 25 a minute, plus the structural work around them. It is an estimate from work actually done, not a stopwatch on anyone. The running total sits in your own dashboard from the first week.

And the founders who volunteered their own figure

20 hours a month
“I do in 5 minutes what used to take one hour. I think it easily saves me 20h a month. We ship features every week. Updating docs is hell.”
Tristan Roth Founder, ISMS Copilot
20 hours a month
“We’re definitely saving at least 20 hours per month which frees me up as a founder to work on more impactful tasks like marketing.”
Emmett Founder, PixelFlow
3 hours a week
“We save about 3 hours per week! This is now a big part of our deploy process.”
Jacob Co-founder & CTO, Evergrove Labs

How we calculated this Every default, and the sentence it came from.

Hours a month on docs today 20 hours: Time saved is a product metric, not a marketing one. Every change Fern publishes is scored for the writing time it replaced — words written and changed at 25 a minute, plus the structural work and a five-minute floor per task — and the running total appears in your own dashboard and in Month at a glance. It is an estimate from work actually performed, not a stopwatch on a person. Founders who volunteered their own figure corroborate it: Tristan Roth of ISMS Copilot, “I think it easily saves me 20h a month”; Emmett of PixelFlow, “We’re definitely saving at least 20 hours per month”; Jacob at Evergrove Labs, three hours a week. We default to twenty. ISMS Copilot case study →
Cost of an hour of that work $47: Our hiring guide puts a mid-level technical writer at $70,000-$85,000, then says: “Add 20-30% for benefits, equipment, and overhead. A $80,000 salary really costs you $100,000.” That example is exactly 25%. Take the middle of the band, add the 25%, divide by a 2,080-hour year: $47 an hour. The same figure applies whether you hire someone or do it yourself at night. How to hire a technical writer →
Share of upkeep hours returned 80%: “I do in 5 minutes what used to take one hour.” That is a 92% cut. We count 80%, so the figure survives the weeks you are writing something genuinely new. ISMS Copilot case study →
Support tickets a month 500: Volumes people actually gave us on discovery calls: Float 500-1,000 a month, Zeffy 5,200, PushOwl around 150 a day, DOTS and TrackFlo “thousands”, BulkMockup four or five a day at the small end. The median sits in the hundreds, so we start at 500. Put your own number in. Book a call and tell us yours →
Cost of a support ticket $30: “For SaaS companies specifically, that number climbs to $25-$35 per ticket when you factor in agent salaries, tools, and management overhead.” We take the midpoint of that band, not the ceiling. How to scale customer support →
Why this is more than your dashboard says $30 here, $10 in the app: Ferndesk’s own “Estimated savings” tile counts only handle time: 13 minutes at $45 an hour, or $10 a ticket. It ignores the salaries, tools and overhead behind that hour, which is why the product under-reports on purpose. This page uses the fully loaded cost. If you would rather argue the conservative number, put $10 in the box. How Ferndesk measures deflected conversations →
Deflection from an accurate help center 40% (range 30-60%): “According to Help Scout, well-designed self-service portals deflect 40-60% of incoming queries.” Published benchmarks run from 30% to 80%. We default to the bottom of the range. Self-service strategies for SaaS →
What you pay us Pro, list price: The same price the pricing page charges: $149 a month, or $1,490 a year with two months free. Under $1M ARR it is half that for your first year, which this page does not assume. Ferndesk pricing →

Your docs have been stale for months. Fix them in ten minutes.

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