Crisp Pricing Explained: Flat Per-Workspace Plans and How the AI Credits Bill

Almost every support tool in this category bills you per person. Crisp does not. It bills per workspace, at a flat monthly rate, with no cap on how many conversations you have. That single decision explains most of what looks strange about the pricing page, and it is the thing worth understanding before you compare Crisp's headline numbers to anyone else's.

As of publication, Crisp's pricing page lists four plans: Free at $0 forever, Mini at $45 a month, Essentials at $95 a month, and Plus at $295 a month. All three paid figures are per workspace, per month. Enterprise exists above them with what Crisp calls unique pricing and a demo request.

The four plans

Every figure in that table comes from Crisp's own pricing page and comparison chart as of publication. Conversations themselves are unlimited on all four plans, including Free.

Free, $0 forever

The Free plan is not a trial that expires. Crisp positions it for solopreneurs and describes it as your first shared inbox, and the plan card lists 2 seats, the website chat widget, a shared inbox, mobile applications, chat SDKs, a contact form, push notifications, and the ecommerce integrations for Shopify, Adobe, WooCommerce and Prestashop.

Two seats and a working shared inbox at zero dollars, with the Shopify connection included rather than held back for a paid tier, is more generous than most of this category manages. The card is explicit that Free includes no AI credits, so the AI agent is off until you pay.

The real ceiling on Free is the customer profile cap of 100. Every unique customer you talk to consumes one. A store doing a hundred orders a month will hit that in the first month, which makes Free a genuine product for a small SaaS or a side project and a short runway for a shop.

Mini, $45/mo

Mini takes seats from 2 to 4 and the profile cap from 100 to 5,000. Its card adds the shared email inbox, shortcuts (canned message gallery), chat triggers, private notes, a custom email domain, unlimited data retention, and internal search. It is the first plan with AI credits: $5, which Crisp equates to around 90 automated conversations.

Sub-inboxes are still 0 on Mini, same as Free. If you were expecting to split "orders" and "returns" into separate folders at this price, that starts at Essentials.

Essentials, $95/mo

The biggest jump in the lineup. Seats go to 10, profiles to 50,000, sub-inboxes appear at 2, and AI credits go to $25, or around 450 automated conversations.

The Essentials card names the features most people are shopping for: the omnichannel inbox (WhatsApp Business, Instagram DMs, SMS, Line, Viber and more), the workflow automation builder, the omnichannel AI chatbot, the knowledge base, analytics, routing rules and assignment, and customer data management. Crisp describes this tier as the full-featured platform and says you get all its flagship features here.

Plus, $295/mo

Crisp marks Plus as best value. It carries 20+ seats, 200,000 profiles, 5 sub-inboxes and $75 of AI credit for around 1,350 automated conversations. The card adds an AI-first support suite, unlimited task automations connecting the AI agent to third-party tools, a ticketing system with a customer portal, 100+ integrations, white labelling (removal of the "We run on Crisp" watermark), enhanced rate limits, and advanced analytics.

Plus is also the only column in the comparison chart with a published price for extra seats: $10 per additional agent per month. The other three columns are blank, so the page gives no answer to "what does a fifth person on Mini cost."

What a workspace actually is

Since the workspace is the billing unit, its definition matters more than usual. Crisp's FAQ defines it as the place where you invite operators to collaborate and answer customer questions, tied to a unique identifier, and states that plans are billed per workspace rather than per domain and sub-domain. Run three storefronts off one Crisp workspace and you pay once.

There is a limit hiding in that answer. Crisp says one workspace can connect one and only one of each channel (Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp Business, Viber, Line, Telegram), with emails as the exception, and that connecting more requires subscribing to higher limits. Two WhatsApp numbers, or two Instagram accounts for two brands, is outside a single workspace. Crisp attaches no figure to what "higher limits" costs.

If you do end up running several workspaces, Crisp publishes a 20% discount for three additional workspaces under one account, available on Essentials and Plus only, arranged by chatting with them.

What the AI credits buy

This is the part of Crisp's pricing that people misread, because it looks like a feature allowance and behaves like a prepaid balance.

Crisp denominates AI in dollars of credit, then annotates each allowance with an approximate conversation count: $5 for around 90, $25 for around 450, $75 for around 1,350. Divide their own pairs and all three land on the same rate, a little under six cents per automated conversation. Crisp does not publish that per-conversation rate anywhere, so treat it as arithmetic on their figures rather than a quoted price, but the consistency across three tiers suggests a real underlying meter rather than a marketing round-off.

The consequence: your AI budget is set by which plan you bought, not by how much support volume you have. A store on Essentials at $95 has AI cover for roughly 450 conversations. Should its monthly volume sit nearer 1,200 with the bulk of it going to the AI agent, the published route to more credit is Plus at $295, which also delivers 10 more seats and 150,000 more customer profiles it may have no use for.

What Crisp does not publish is the price of topping up mid-month. If you burn $25 of credit by the tenth, the pricing page says nothing about what the next block costs or whether the AI simply stops. That is the single most important missing number on the page for anyone planning to lean on the AI agent, and it is worth asking in the chat widget before you commit.

Unlimited conversations, and why Crisp means it

Crisp devotes a section of the pricing page to arguing that consumption billing is the wrong model, comparing per-conversation pricing unfavourably to how we buy mobile plans and internet access, and says you pay one consistent price regardless of monthly conversation volume. The comparison chart lists unlimited conversations as a line item across all four plans, Free included.

Credit where it is due, because this is unusual and it is not a trick. If your December volume triples, your Crisp bill does not. For a store with a seasonal peak, that removes a real category of anxiety, and Crisp has held this position long enough that the FAQ answer explaining it reads like a stated principle rather than a promo.

The nuance worth carrying: the flat fee covers conversations. It does not cover automated conversations. Human volume is unlimited, AI volume is metered, and those are two different meters living inside one subscription.

Billing terms, discounts and the trial

The trial. 14 days, full access to all Crisp features, no card required to start or finish it. Crisp applies it to any plan.

Annual billing. Crisp confirms yearly payment exists and describes how to switch: you toggle it on the Plans page inside the app after you have subscribed. The pricing page publishes no annual discount percentage, so the saving is unknown until you are already a customer.

VAT. Not included in the listed prices. Crisp charges the advertised flat price to businesses, applies VAT to consumers, zeroes it for EU businesses that enter a VAT number, and charges none at all outside the EU.

Nonprofits and students. 50% off, by asking in chat for a promo code.

Overages beyond the plan. Crisp's FAQ says some features sit outside your plan and can be subscribed to separately, naming paid integrations for specific systems, additional contacts, and more than 20 agents in the inbox. No prices are attached to any of the three.

Crisp says 10,000 companies use it, which is context rather than a price, but it is the number they put next to these plans.

The figures Crisp leaves off the page

Stating the gaps beats guessing at them:

• Extra AI credit, at any volume
• Additional seats on Free, Mini or Essentials (only Plus shows $10)
• The annual discount percentage
• Enterprise, described only as unique pricing
• Additional channels beyond one of each per workspace
• Additional customer contacts above the plan cap

One methodological note. Crisp's per-feature comparison grid renders in the browser and does not survive a plain fetch, so the checkmarks showing which tier a given feature starts at were not readable from the source used for this article. Every feature attributed to a tier above comes from the plan card, which names its own inclusions in text. Anything not named on a card has been left out on purpose.

What a real Crisp bill looks like

Working only from published figures:

A two-person business on Free pays nothing, for as long as it stays under 100 customer profiles and does not want AI.

A four-person team on Mini pays $45 a month total, which works out to about $11 per person. Roughly 90 conversations a month can be automated before the credits run out.

A ten-person team on Essentials pays $95 a month, about $9.50 per person, with omnichannel and the AI chatbot switched on and around 450 automated conversations covered.

A twenty-person team on Plus pays $295 a month, about $14.75 per person, with white labelling and the ticketing system included. The twenty-fifth agent adds $10 a month.

Those per-person figures are division on Crisp's numbers, not rates Crisp publishes. They are the honest way to compare Crisp against a per-seat tool like Front, where the bill scales with headcount by design. On seats alone, Crisp is inexpensive, and at ten people on Essentials it is close to unbeatable.

Who the workspace-plus-credits model suits badly

The model is built for a team that talks to a lot of customers with a moderate number of humans and wants AI as an assistant rather than the primary responder. Read that sentence backwards and you get the mismatch.

Very small teams with high automation needs. A two-person store handling 800 conversations a month has no use for 10 seats and every use for AI capacity. Crisp sells those together. Getting from around 90 automated conversations to around 450 means moving from $45 to $95 and collecting six extra seats nobody will log into. The seats are what you are paying for, and they are the thing you do not need.

Anyone whose AI usage is the variable. Flat pricing removes volume risk from the part of the bill Crisp does not meter and leaves it in the part it does. If your plan is to automate the majority of your queue, the credit balance becomes the number you watch every month, and it is the number Crisp publishes least about. Unlimited conversations are worth less when the conversations you care about are the automated ones.

Multi-brand operations. One workspace, one Instagram, one WhatsApp number. Two brands means two subscriptions, discounted 20% at three or more additional workspaces, and only if you are on Essentials or Plus.

Stores hitting the profile cap early. 100 unique customers on Free and 5,000 on Mini are hard ceilings on a metric that only goes up. A shop with steady new-customer acquisition ages out of those tiers on a timeline it cannot control, which makes the entry price less permanent than it appears.

Where people answer the queue and AI only trims the edges, none of the above bites and Crisp is priced well for you. If AI resolution is the point of the purchase, the flat fee is covering the part of your usage that was never going to be expensive.

The other way to price this

Volume-based pricing runs the opposite trade: cap the conversations, include the AI. Ernest is an AI support agent for Shopify and WooCommerce and prices that way. Free at $0 for 100 conversations that never expire, then $49 a month for 500, $149 for 2,000, and $299 for 10,000. AI is included at every tier with no separate credit balance, and there are no per-seat fees, so headcount never changes the bill.

Set against Crisp's published numbers, the two models invert cleanly. Crisp charges $95 for 10 seats, unlimited conversations and around 450 automated ones. Ernest charges $149 for 2,000 conversations with every one of them AI-answered and no seat limit to think about. Which is cheaper depends entirely on what fraction of your queue you want a machine to handle.

Ernest's limits, stated because a pricing comparison without them is not useful: storefront chat widget and email only, with escalation to a human by email. No WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS or phone, all of which Crisp's omnichannel inbox covers. No shared-inbox machinery, so no sub-inboxes, routing rules or ticketing portal. No CRM, no help center product, no white labelling. Crisp sells all of that and Ernest does not attempt it.

For the fuller argument about which shape fits a store, see our Crisp alternative comparison. If you are also weighing tools that split the chat plan from the AI bill, Tidio's pricing works the same way and is worth reading alongside this.

Every Crisp figure here comes from Crisp's public pricing page as of publication. Vendors change prices, and Crisp's own page is the authority over this one.