We were paying customers for front for a few months in 2018. We quickly outgrew it because our daily email volume grew from a few hundred to a few thousand a day. Moved on to Freshdesk which isn't as pretty as Front, but worked better for higher volume of emails.

I'm a solo dev working on 2-3 side projects. I have 2 freelance customer support staff helping me with normal support stuff but also acquisition and outreach, while I focus on freelance development (which is unrelated to the side-projects). Possible I will add 1-2 more support in the coming year.

For this use-case Front has been really awesome. Each side project has a different domain and each project has several role-based emails (one for clients -> support@domain and one for content stuff team@domain). Plus Facebook and Twitter.

Email arrives at the person who sent the first email, and I can easily assign emails written to me to a team member. The internal chat functionality is clear (in Zendesk the UI was a bit confusing so sometimes we inadvertently wrote the internal message to the client - nothing bad, but still unprofessional).

I tried Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom and some others, but always had some trouble with one of the requirements. E.g. can't use different outgoing signatures. Or a second domain requires a second account or the Enterprise upgrade (for 20 emails a day?), or there were so many different filters and views that I got confused.

Probably for enterprise level you might need something else and you need all the rules and automation stuff, but for my use case it's been great. It's not the cheapest, but it's worth it, because we've been able to answer to support inquiries faster and I have less work to do.

Use it with a team of about 10, for almost a year now. Interface with customers via email, SMS and chat. It is universally liked in our group. The internal discussion on different communication channels is wonderful. The API is well documented and quite permissive as to what you can do. Keyboard shortcuts galore. No direct IMAP connection now, but if you have GApps it works well. UI seems snappy, and I've seen no issue leaving the tab open for weeks straight.

I have been the most impressed with their response to feature suggestions. I raised a few points for improvment using the general help chat in the interface and to my surprise saw my suggestions released as a feature a few weeks later. Granted, they were minor interface items, but the fact someone actually took the time to consider it and slot it in for dev time means something to me, being on the other side of that usually.

Was amazing for us basically to discuss and dispatch incoming and outgoing emails, drafting responses and templates together, without descending into deeper circles of “forward hell” or sharing email screenshots on other messages. Massively reduced inbox/messenger clutter by moving email-centric collaboration much closer to email. Lots of glitches and missing features a couple of years ago when I was relying on it heavily, hope they polished the product since.