Plain and Gladly Are Both Trying to Kill the Support Ticket

The support ticket is one of the most quietly powerful ideas in software. You have generated hundreds of them without noticing - every time you emailed a company and got back a reply with a reference number, a queue swallowed you. For twenty years, buying better support meant buying a faster, smarter version of that queue. Two companies, on two continents, selling to two audiences that will almost never overlap, have decided the queue itself is the bug.

One is Plain, founded in London in 2020 by Simon Rohrbach and Matt Vagni. The other is Gladly, founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Joseph Ansanelli. Plain sells to developer tools and B2B startups. Gladly sells to consumer brands - the kind you order sneakers or skincare from. They do not compete for deals. They compete for the same sentence: people, not tickets.

01 / The idea everyone acceptedWhere the ticket came from

The ticket exists for a boring reason: email had no memory. A message arrived, someone answered it, and the thread died. To track whether anything got resolved, teams wrapped each message in a numbered container - a ticket - and built queues, statuses, and SLAs around it. It worked. It also quietly reshaped how companies think. Support became a factory measured in tickets closed per hour, sitting in a room by itself, disconnected from the engineers who built the product and the success managers who owned the account.

That worked when a customer was a stranger sending one complaint. It falls apart the moment the customer is a person you have a real, ongoing relationship with - a developer integrating your API for the third month running, or a shopper who has bought from you nine times. Ask either of them to open a fresh ticket and repeat their whole history, and you have told them the truth: your system has no idea who they are.

02 / The B2B answerPlain moves support into the chat

Rohrbach and Vagni met at Deliveroo, where they helped scale the company from startup to something enormous, and watched support drift into exactly that silo. Plain is the tool they wished they had. Instead of routing everything into an email inbox, it pulls conversations out of Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and email into one workspace where support, customer success, and engineering all sit together. When a developer hits a bug in a shared Slack channel, the engineer who can fix it is already in the room - no ticket handed across a wall.

The pitch is speed and closeness. "It means you can literally talk to your customers wherever they are," Rohrbach told TechCrunch. Crucially, Plain keeps the boring machinery too - SLAs, response-time metrics, the reporting a real support org needs - so switching does not feel like giving anything up. Companies like Sanity, Laravel, Stytch and Raycast run on it. In February 2025 the company raised a $15M Series A led by Battery Ventures, with Index and Connect Ventures joining, and set up a San Francisco office. Plain calls the category "customer collaboration."

03 / The B2C answerGladly gives you one conversation for life

Gladly got to the same conclusion a decade earlier, from the opposite end. Ansanelli's founding idea sounds almost too simple to be a company: make customer service personal again. In practice that meant deleting the ticket and replacing it with a single, persistent conversation per customer that runs for the life of the relationship. Every call, chat, email, SMS, and social message lands on one timeline. An agent opening it sees the whole person - past orders, preferences, previous contacts - without the customer repeating a word.

For a retailer, that is not a nicety. It is loyalty and lifetime value. Gladly says brands on its platform see roughly a 40% reduction in cost and a 50% jump in efficiency, with payback in about seven months. The tagline it has carried for years is blunt about the enemy: the only customer experience platform built around people - not tickets.

The contrast with Plain is instructive precisely because the two never meet in a sales cycle. Plain's customer is a five-person startup whose "support" is three engineers taking turns in Slack; the problem is that those three people, plus customer success, plus the on-call engineer, need to see the same thread without copy-pasting it into a ticket. Gladly's customer is a household retail brand with hundreds of agents and millions of shoppers; the problem is that any one of those agents might pick up a call from someone who has been buying for years, and needs to sound like the company remembers. Different scale, different channel mix, different buyer. The same refusal underneath: do not make the software organize itself around a disposable case when the relationship is the thing that lasts.

02.5 / Two founders, one instinctWhy builders keep landing here

It is worth sitting with how differently these two arrived at the same place. Ansanelli is a repeat founder who had already sold companies before Gladly; his move was patient and top-down, spending years and a full platform rebuild to make "customers, not tickets" real for enterprise brands that do not switch systems lightly. Rohrbach and Vagni came at it bottom-up, as operators who felt the pain firsthand while scaling someone else's company, then built the fast, developer-friendly tool they had wanted. One started from a philosophy and engineered backward to the product; the others started from a daily annoyance and generalized forward to a philosophy. Both routes ended at the same door. When independent teams converge on the same unfashionable idea from unrelated directions, that convergence is usually the signal - not the noise.

04 / The move worth stealingRefuse the default unit

Here is the part a builder in any industry can take. Neither company won by shipping a better ticketing system. They won by refusing the ticket - by finding the one assumption everyone in the category treated as physics and asking whether it should exist at all. That is a harder pitch than "we are faster," and a much stronger one. It reframes the incumbent's entire product as a workaround from a poorer era.

Notice, too, what neither company leads with: AI. Both have plenty of it - drafting replies, automating the repetitive stuff, resolving simple conversations end to end. But AI is the table stakes, not the thesis. The real product decision is what the AI acts on. Point it at a queue of disconnected tickets and you get a faster queue. Point it at a living record of a human being - a channel, a history, a relationship - and you get something that behaves like it knows the customer. The data model is the strategy. The AI just runs on top.

What each company organizes support around

Ticket / case

legacy tools

Channel + team

Plain

The person

Gladly

05 / What it means for youIf you run support

The practical test is short. Does your tool force customers to repeat themselves? Does a question that needs an engineer or an account owner still get thrown over a wall as a ticket? Can any agent see the whole relationship, not just the open thread? If the answers are yes, no, and no, you are running a filing cabinet with a chat window bolted on - and that is precisely the gap both of these companies are selling against.

You do not have to buy either one to take the lesson. Whatever you build, there is probably a default unit of work your whole industry treats as a law of nature - the ticket, the invoice, the pull request, the case file. Plain and Gladly are a reminder that these units are inventions, usually born from an old technical limit that no longer applies. Find yours, ask whether it should still exist, and you may have found the outline of a company. One customer's line about Plain works as a verdict on the whole shift: it "feels like the future." The tell is that the future turned out to be the same in B2B and B2C - fewer tickets, more people.