Savings calculator
The help center isn’t the cost. Keeping it true is.
Keeping docs current takes research, writing, screenshots, and checking what changed. Set your numbers.
Keeping docs true
hours
Include research, writing, screenshots, and checking what changed in your product.
$ an hour
Support
tickets
$ SaaS runs $25-$35
40%
30% 60%
Estimated hours back 16 hours a month
Based on 20 hours a month you spend now, with 20% left for your review and edits.
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
What goes into your estimate.
Start with the hours you spend on documentation today, including research, planning, writing, screenshots, and checking your product. This calculator estimates returning 80% of that time, leaving room for your review and edits.
Your dashboard estimates time saved from work Fern has done, including published changes, drafts ready for review, and successful verification. It accounts for the work around writing, keeps small edits small, and caps repeated research and checks.
What founders report saving
- 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 Our defaults, sources, and assumptions.
- Hours a month on docs today 20 hours
- Twenty hours is a starting point for your current monthly docs workload. Include research, planning, writing, screenshots, and checking articles against your product. ISMS Copilot and PixelFlow each report saving around twenty hours a month; Evergrove Labs reports three hours a week. These are individual customer reports. Enter the time you spend today to estimate your own savings. 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. That is a reference cost for a writer. If you maintain the docs yourself, set the hourly rate to what an hour of your time is worth. How to hire a technical writer →
- Share of upkeep hours returned 80%
- “I do in 5 minutes what used to take one hour.” That customer reported about a 92% reduction. We use 80% as a planning assumption, leaving room for your review and edits. With 20 hours of monthly docs work, the estimate is 16 hours back. Your dashboard separately estimates time saved from work Fern has done. 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.
Import your help center and Fern checks every article against your product, drafts the fixes, and keeps them current from then on. You approve, she publishes.
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- Import in 10 minutes, URLs preserved
- Your support tool stays where it is
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