Explaining Zendesk Storage Limits
An Explanation for Zendesk’s Storage Limits
Zendesk is designed to scale with your support operation, but its storage model can lead to rising costs as attachment volumes grow. Storage is divided into two separate areas, each with its own limits, which means file-heavy teams often reach their allowance faster than anticipated. Here we explain how storage in Zendesk works and how to reduce this what can feel unmanageable cost.
The first type of storage is ticket data storage. This covers the tickets themselves: the message content, metadata, custom fields, internal notes, and system information that makes each ticket function inside Zendesk. For most organisations, this type of storage grows slowly and rarely becomes a problem.
The second, and far more impactful, category is file storage. File storage includes all attachments associated with tickets: customer photos and screenshots, PDFs, invoices, log files, diagnostic dumps, and increasingly large media files such as videos. Any file attached via email, web form, or API contributes to this total.
Each Zendesk plan includes a base allowance for both ticket data and file storage, with additional capacity added per agent. While the exact numbers vary by plan, every tier starts with the same base amount and scales incrementally as agents are added.
| Plan | Data Base Storage | Data Additional Storage | File Base Storage | File Additional Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team | 10GB | 50MB per Agent | 10GB | 2GB per Agent |
| Growth | 10GB | 100MB per Agent | 10GB | 5GB per Agent |
| Professional | 10GB | 100MB per Agent | 10GB | 5GB per Agent |
| Enterprise | 10GB | 200MB per Agent | 10GB | 10GB per Agent |
When storage usage approaches the limit, Zendesk issues a warning and recommends purchasing a storage add-on. Each add-on provides 500 MB of additional ticket data storage and 25 GB of additional file storage, typically at a cost of around $60 per month. These add-ons must be purchased as a fixed unit; it is not possible to buy only file storage, nor to purchase smaller increments.
For most teams, exceeding ticket data storage is rare. File storage, however, is a common and recurring issue. Because Zendesk bundles the two together, many organisations end up paying for additional ticket data capacity they do not need, simply to accommodate growing attachment volumes. As support operations scale, this pricing model becomes increasingly inefficient. Older tickets, often closed months or years ago, continue to occupy expensive Zendesk storage, even though they are accessed infrequently. Deleting them is usually not an option, as agents still need historical context for compliance, follow-ups, or customer disputes.
This is where our attachment offloading provides a more cost-effective alternative. Rather than purchasing Zendesk storage add-ons, closed ticket attachments can be moved to external storage at a fraction of the cost. The attachments are removed from Zendesk’s file storage, but remain accessible to agents directly within Zendesk through our sidebar app, with no change to their workflow. Zendesk remains the system agents access and use, while attachments are stored more efficiently elsewhere. The result is lower costs, faster ticket performance, and the confidence that storage costs will not continue to impact your business as ticket volumes grow.
For most customers, this approach reduces storage costs by 80–90%, and in some cases even more when using a hybrid setup with existing cloud storage. Smaller teams can also benefit immediately, as offloading up to 3 GB of attachments is completely free. For teams that rely on Zendesk and handle attachment-heavy support, understanding how storage works (and choosing a smarter way to manage it!) can make a significant difference over time.
In under 5 minutes, you can see immediate results and transform how your Zendesk handles attachments. Get started today at https://eh7p.com/zd-offload/ or by getting in touch with us at [email protected]