Knowledge base ROI and rot cost calculator

How the calculator works

An out-of-date article costs you in two places. Some readers get a wrong or confusing answer and open a ticket anyway. And if you run a Freddy AI Agent, it answers from the same articles, so a stale article becomes a stale answer.

The calculator multiplies your own numbers, nothing else:

• Tickets caused = monthly article views × the share of views that land on an out-of-date article × the share of those readers who then write in.
• Ticket cost = tickets caused × what one ticket costs you to handle.
• Freddy cost = Freddy sessions × the share answered from an out-of-date article, priced at Freshdesk's overage rate of $49 per 100 sessions.

Every default is a placeholder for you to replace. We don't publish an industry average for stale articles because we don't have a trustworthy one. When the free audit has run on enough help centers, we'll publish the anonymised medians and link them here.

Checked 2026-09-18 · Freddy AI Agent: 500 sessions included, then $49 per 100, on the Freshdesk pricing page.

Where to find your numbers in Freshdesk

• Article views. Freshdesk's knowledge base dashboard and curated knowledge base reports show views per article. Knowledge base analytics are a Pro and Enterprise feature.
• Share of articles out of date. Count articles not updated in 12 months as a first guess, or export the list and sort by updated_at. Age alone overstates it: some old articles are still right.
• Share of views on those articles. Add up the views of the articles you flagged and divide by total views. Old articles are often your most-read ones.
• Readers who then write in. The hardest number. A fair way to estimate it: pick five stale articles, and count tickets in a month that mention their topic.
• Cost per ticket. Monthly support cost (salaries, tools) divided by monthly tickets. If you don't have it, use your team's hourly cost × average handle time.
• Freddy sessions. Your Freddy AI Agent analytics show sessions per month. Leave it at 0 if you don't use one.

Turn the estimate into a measurement

The estimate is only as good as the share of out-of-date articles you type in. Three ways to get a real figure, from quickest to most complete:

1. Run the free audit on your public help center. It flags old years, broken and dead internal links, and near-duplicate titles.
2. Work through the knowledge base audit checklist on your 20 most-viewed articles. It takes an afternoon.
3. Scan everything with the API, including drafts and translations. A translation that fell behind its primary article is out of date even when the primary is fine.

What it leaves out

This is a floor, not a full cost. It leaves out customers who give up without writing in, agents who answer the same question again because the article can't be trusted, the time a reviewer spends when a Freddy answer escalates, and search rankings lost to thin or duplicate pages. None of these can be estimated honestly from a web form, so the calculator doesn't try.

Freshdesk and Freddy are trademarks of Freshworks Inc. TidyKB is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by any company named on this page.