I tried the Zendesk JIRA plugin. It did not work, but their support is active, so can probably fight through the bugs.
Seems like the options are:

• Try to fight through the zendesk <-> JIRA integration bugs. Risk is, may never really work correctly. Also, need JIRA support to remove the Zendesk plugin, because it alters loads of aspects of JIRA.
• Migrate to Zendesk
• Wait for JIRA to deliver. Maybe never.
• Migrate to another solution, like Request Tracker. I'm testing that. Seems pretty good.

I have same issue. Small company, lots of customers. We would never have installed this solution if we'd realised this basic functionality was missing. We're now transitioning away from using JIRA and are actively looking for a better option. I'll look at zendesk now - thanks for the tip+

Zendesk is a great product. We use it all day every day.

Service Desk was never really developed for customer facing support. It was developed for an internal support desk.

It would be great if Atlassian could work out a way to modify their licence scheme for Service Desk but I should imagine that's not a trivial task and is going to find it hard to find its way to the top of their priority list.

Still no answer on this - it's costing my business money not to have a service desk where you can send notifications back to issue reporters that aren't actual users of JIRA.

Tired of waiting - anyone got an opinion on Zendesk? https://www.zendesk.com/product/tour

Looks like I can pay the same amount of money as I do for Service Desk, except I get a full service desk product...?

Also vote for this issue!

Simple add rights for login users in role "Service Desk Customers" to customer portal.
If user not in group "users" then its can't login to jira and to Service Desk Customers Portal.

Good solution divide Service Desk Customers Potal and Jira login mechanism.

Many small company have big clients. Good service to client add all its users to system.
Best way to create another register system for customer portal (jira in private mode, customer portal in public mode).

I can't buy 500+ users license, but after you fix my issue i promise buy Service Desk for 50 users!

I recognise Atlassian as a company has to make its own decisions about licensing and priorities for development. So the following is my suggestion only.

Service Desk looks really awesome but the licensing doesn't allow it to become an outward facing support environment.

We now pay $10 for Jira and $10 per year for maintenance. I would be happy to pay a lot more than that for 10 users. However we have in excess of 200 customers so we would have to pay at least $14,000 for Jira + Service Desk (I'm not sure how this would work with Jira Agile). There's just no way we could find that sort of money. We could easily end up with 10,000 customers in a couple of years time – the vast majority of whom would ask one question and never have to come back again. But we'd have to keep the license open for them because they might.

So I'd vote for an (maybe even significant) increase in the 10 user license fee if it meant we could get access to Service Desk with unlimited use for customers.

Sent here by support.
It does not make sense to price licenses at the same amount for "stub users" who only create tickets and for "support agents" who field the tickets. This pricing model is so backward and unprecedented in the issue tracking industry that I didn't even think to check it out when I made the purchase. This is a new product, so I'm hoping Atlassian will reconsider their monetization strategy here and bring it into reach of organizations with sub-five-figure budgets.

If Atlassian really wants Service Desk to get the right attention, sales as well as replace a lot of other ticketing solutions, they would have to give client accounts un-related to the user tier licensing. I don't think calling it an 'internal service desk' solves the problem. You wouldn't need SLAs for servicing internal issues, especially for small companies. The licensing model is really ridiculous. I hope Atlassian does something about this soon because we really want to use JIRA Service Desk instead of our current service desk.

I guess the main problem is that JIRA Service Desk would need to match JIRA license tier plus all JIRA Plugins. That's really ridiculous.

The customer portal is already there, so we just need customer accounts who will only have access to that customer portal, their reported issues and comments related to those issues. I think it's doable

This needs to be implemented. It is not possible for me to purchase a license for users that might send in a support request for a new keyboard once a year.

Directed here by Atlassian helpdesk....

It looks like Service Desk is missing something crucial: the ability for external users to submit requests via email and JIRA generate an acknowledgement back. I've read the discussions in the forum, including the (frankly utterly unhelpful) Atlassian responses that everyone needs to be a registered user to get notifications, or that Service Desk is only engineered to be for internal teams, or that there are plugins that get around this issue (that aren't available to OnDemand JIRA).
At the very least what I need is to be able to see the original requester's email in the JSON payload to the Create Issue webhook, and I can take it from there.
Ideally, I'd like to see Service Desk built out with this anonymous notification feature ASAP - as it stands it's not a viable service desk offering at all.

This is NOT A NICE-TO-HAVE, this is the difference between us building out our service offering around JIRA or around a competitor product. If I have to leave JIRA for a 10-year-old PHP app I'll not be happy....