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Helpdesk Workflow Migration Cloner

Clone macros, triggers, SLAs, and routing when switching help desks—so day-one support keeps working after Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom migrations.

A support ops lead signs a contract with a new help desk on Friday and opens the migration checklist Monday morning. Tickets? Covered — every vendor and third-party tool in the category knows how to copy subject lines, requester emails, and comment threads. Macros, triggers, SLA policies, routing rules, and the conditional automations that actually keep first-response times honest? Those stay behind on the old platform, and nobody warned her until the cutover date was already printed on the all-hands slide.

Built for Developers, Solo Founders, Weekend Builders.

Data migration services sit north of $25B globally in the mid-2020s, with high-teens compound growth driven by cloud re-platforming, M&A integration, and SaaS sprawl (market analysis). Ticket export is a thin slice of that pie; workflow reconstruction is the upsell incumbents leave on the table.

Suggested stack: Next.js 14 + Vercel, Postgres (Supabase or Neon), Platform APIs — Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Help Scout, Gorgias, Claude (structured JSON output), BullMQ + Redis, Stripe Billing. Weekend scope: about 10 hours.

The Problem

A support ops lead signs a contract with a new help desk on Friday and opens the migration checklist Monday morning. Tickets? Covered — every vendor and third-party tool in the…

The Solution

Helpdesk Workflow Migration Cloner is a migration layer that treats automations as first-class citizens, not an afterthought bolted onto ticket export. You connect read-only API…

Market Research

Data migration services sit north of $25B globally in the mid-2020s, with high-teens compound growth driven by cloud re-platforming, M&A integration, and SaaS sprawl (market…

Competitive Landscape

Help Desk Migration by Relokia — The clearest price anchor in the category: automated ticket, user, and attachment migration advertised from roughly $37+ per migration job, with…

Business Model

Discovery Scan ($0) — Read-only inventory of source automations with counts by type and a red/yellow/green parity preview. Captures the ops lead who is six weeks from contract…

Recommended Tech Stack

Next.js 14 + Vercel — Customer-facing reconciliation dashboard, migration job status, and side-by-side rule diffs. App Router for the portal; Edge functions for OAuth callbacks…

AI Prompts to Build This

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  1. 1. Project Setup

    Build the weekend MVP of the "Helpdesk Workflow Migration Cloner": read a Zendesk account's triggers, automations and macros, translate each toward Freshdesk's rule format, and give the admin a reviewed list of what carries over, what carries over partly and what has no equivalent. Nothing is written to Freshdesk.
    
    Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase (Postgres, Row Level Security, Auth with email magic link), the Zendesk API with a read-only token pasted at scan time, the Anthropic API for the translation. The Zendesk token is used for the scan and never stored. Deploy on Vercel.
    
    Tables (Row Level Security on, each user reads only their own rows):
    - migrations(id, user_id, route_pair, status, created_at)
    - source_rules(id, migration_id, external_id, rule_type, title, raw_json jsonb) rule_type is trigger, automation or macro
    - translated_rules(id, migration_id, source_rule_id, dest_object_type, dest_payload jsonb, parity_status, confidence, gap_notes, manual_steps text[], human_approved boolean) parity_status is clean, partial or no_equivalent
    
    Screens: /login, /migrations/new (subdomain, email and token), /migrations/[id] (summary counts), /migrations/[id]/review (table, filter and side-by-side).
    Env vars (names only): NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL, NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY, SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY (server only), ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.
    
    Do not build: billing, quotes or migration tiers, writing to Freshdesk or any destination, other route pairs, SLA policies and views, ticket history migration, a queue or Redis, smoke tests.
    Done when: npm run dev starts, you can sign in, and the three tables exist with Row Level Security on.
  2. 2. Core Feature

    Build the one feature that proves the Migration Cloner: an honest map of which rules survive the move.
    1. POST /api/migrations/[id]/scan takes the Zendesk subdomain, email and API token for this request only. Page through triggers, automations and macros with the read-only API and save each as a source_rules row with its external_id and raw JSON. Do not store or log the token.
    2. Keep a hand-written capability matrix in one file: for the Zendesk to Freshdesk pair, the condition fields and the actions Freshdesk can express, written from Freshdesk's own documentation. The model may only use what is in this file.
    3. For each rule, send the raw JSON and the matrix to the Anthropic API with a strict JSON schema { dest_object_type, dest_payload, parity_status: "clean" | "partial" | "no_equivalent", confidence: number from 0 to 1, gap_notes: string, manual_steps: string[] }.
    4. Check the answer in code. If dest_payload names any condition or action that is not in the matrix, downgrade the parity_status to partial, or to no_equivalent if nothing remains, and add a gap note saying which item is missing.
    5. The review page shows summary cards (counts and percentages of clean, partial and no_equivalent), a table filterable by parity status, and a side-by-side view for partial rules: the source rule as readable bullets on the left, the proposed Freshdesk rule as editable JSON on the right.
    6. An Approve checkbox per rule, and an Export button that downloads only approved rules as JSON plus a Markdown checklist of the no_equivalent rules and their manual steps.
    Rules: never claim a rule is clean unless every part is in the matrix. Never write to any help desk.
    Empty state: with no migrations, show the form and what a read-only token is.
    Done when: scanning a sample account saves its rules, a rule that uses a field outside the matrix is downgraded, the counts add up to the number of rules, and the export contains only approved rules.
  3. 3. Landing Page

    Build a one-page landing site for the Helpdesk Workflow Migration Cloner, for teams moving from one help desk to another.
    Hero: "Move the tickets and the runbook." Sub: "Most tools move your ticket history. We map your macros, triggers and automations so day one of support still works." One button: Join the waitlist.
    Sections: the problem (the migration finishes and routing quietly breaks), a sample review table with clean, partial and no-equivalent rules, how it works in four steps (connect read-only, scan, review, export), and an FAQ on read-only access (the token is never stored), what is not migrated yet (ticket history and SLAs) and which help desks come next.
    Waitlist: store the email in a waitlist table in Supabase. No other service.
    Style: Geist, an off-white background, near-black type, one blue accent.
    Done when: the page renders on a phone and a submitted email appears in the waitlist table.
  4. 4. Branding Package

    Use a design or image tool for this one. A coding agent cannot draw a logo.
    Brand for the Helpdesk Workflow Migration Cloner: pick a short working name, then design a wordmark and an icon that suggest two stacked boxes with an arrow between them.
    Colors: off-white, near-black and one blue. Type: Geist, with IBM Plex Mono for rule names.
    Deliverables: wordmark, icon, three parity badges (clean, partial, no equivalent) that differ by shape as well as color, and one launch graphic built from a review table.
    Done when: each deliverable is saved in one folder and the parity badges are distinguishable without color.