Front Pricing Explained: Seat Tiers, AI Add-Ons, and What Moves the Bill

Front publishes a per-seat price for all three of its plans, including the top one. That is rarer than it should be in this category, where "contact sales" is the standard answer above the mid tier. As of publication, Front's pricing page lists Starter at $25 per seat per month, Professional at $65 per seat per month, and Enterprise at $105 per seat per month.

One condition applies to all three figures. The page displays them under a "Billed Annually" toggle, and Front advertises a 24% saving for annual billing. Front does not publish the month-to-month rates on that view, so read the three numbers as annual-commit pricing and assume a monthly plan costs more.

The three plans at a glance

All figures above are from Front's own pricing page as of publication.

Starter, $25/seat/mo

The number Front attaches to Starter is "up to 10 seats," which is a ceiling rather than a floor. Front does not publish a minimum seat count for any plan, so the pricing page gives no answer to "what does a two-person team pay to get in the door." Assume $25 per person per month for however many people you license and verify the minimum with sales before you budget against it.

The bigger Starter constraint is not the seat cap. Starter supports a single channel type, and Front's own FAQ is direct about it: the plan supports one of Email, Front Chat, or SMS, and connecting multiple channel types requires Professional or Enterprise. A store running email support plus a website chat widget is already outside Starter regardless of headcount.

Starter includes the shared inbox and ticketing system, AI Topics, up to 10 automation rules, basic analytics, and a no-code public knowledge base. AI add-ons can be attached.

Professional, $65/seat/mo

Professional is where Front becomes the product most people mean when they say "Front": omnichannel (email, SMS, social, WhatsApp and more in one inbox), macros plus up to 20 automation rules, advanced analytics, up to 5 workspaces, and SSO and SCIM for user management. Front lists it as "up to 50 seats."

The jump from $25 to $65 is a 160% increase in the per-seat rate, and it is the single largest decision in Front's pricing. For a five-person team that is the difference between $125 and $325 a month before any AI is switched on.

Enterprise, $105/seat/mo

Enterprise adds smart rules, unlimited rules and macros, a multi-language knowledge base, custom roles and permissions, and custom reports. It also folds in three of the AI add-ons: Copilot, Smart QA and Smart CSAT are included rather than billed separately. Front's page marks Enterprise as its most popular plan.

Front does not publish a seat ceiling or a seat minimum for Enterprise, and does not publish a floor on contract value for the plan itself. Two related numbers do appear elsewhere on the page, and they hint at where the enterprise conversation starts: annual contracts over $12K can pay by wire transfer or ACH, and contracts over $25k require an onboarding package to be purchased.

What a seat actually is

Front defines a seat as a paid Front license granted to a unique user in your organization. That is the whole billing unit. Every person who needs to log in and work in the inbox consumes one, and the bill scales with headcount rather than with how many customers you talk to.

Two details soften that slightly. Guest accounts let you invite colleagues to comment on a conversation without needing a license, which is genuinely useful when a support agent needs the warehouse manager's input on one thread and nothing else. And channel limits are calculated per license, not per account: 10 channels per license on Starter, 30 on Professional, 50 on Enterprise. Front's own example is a team of 5 on Professional getting a maximum of 150 channels.

One rule to plan around: Front states that plans are assigned at the organization level and seats cannot be combined across plans. You cannot put three power users on Enterprise and six occasional responders on Starter. Everyone sits on the same tier, which means the person who needs the multi-language knowledge base sets the price for the person who answers four emails a week.

The AI add-ons, where the bill really moves

Front sells its AI as four separately priced products. As of publication:

Copilot is the real-time assistant that drafts replies and suggests next steps. Smart QA runs AI scorecards over agent performance. Smart CSAT infers satisfaction scores without sending surveys. All three are per-seat, which means they inherit the same headcount scaling as the base plan: adding Copilot to a Professional seat takes it from $65 to $85 a month.

Autopilot is the different one. It is Front's omnichannel AI agent, the piece that resolves customer work without a human writing the reply, and it is priced per conversation starting at $0.05 rather than per seat. Front lists it as an add-on on every plan including Enterprise, so the tier that bundles the other three AI products still bills Autopilot separately. Front publishes only the "starting at" figure, not the volume tiers above it, so the effective rate at any real volume is a sales conversation.

Some AI is included at every tier without an add-on. Front's plan comparison lists Topics (analysis of why customers contact you), Compose, Translate and Summarize across all three plans, each capped at up to 200 actions per teammate per day. Front states it uses OpenAI, Azure OpenAI and Amazon AWS text generation APIs behind these features.

Non-AI add-ons

Two more line items sit outside the plan price.

Native WhatsApp Channel. Front bills this as Meta-billed WhatsApp costs plus a 20% admin fee, and it is available on Professional and Enterprise. The underlying Meta cost is variable and Front does not publish an estimate, so this is an unbounded line item on your invoice. Third-party WhatsApp via Twilio or Number AI is listed as an alternative route.

API rate limit increase. $200 per 100 API requests per minute per month, available on all plans. Worth knowing about if you plan to sync Front with an ecommerce backend and expect meaningful call volume.

There is also a services layer. Front lists three Success Services packages (Professional Onboarding, Enterprise Onboarding, and project hours) with pricing published in a separate PDF rather than on the pricing page, and requires an onboarding package for contracts over $25k.

What a real bill looks like

Working from Front's published figures only, and assuming annual billing:

A three-person team on Starter with email only pays $75 a month. That is the cheapest realistic Front configuration, and it buys a shared inbox with ticketing on one channel type.

A six-person team on Professional pays $390 a month. Add Copilot for everyone at $20 a seat and it is $510. Add the Smart QA and Smart CSAT bundle at $25 a seat instead of buying them separately and it is $660.

A six-person team on Enterprise pays $630 a month with Copilot, Smart QA and Smart CSAT already included. Compared to the $660 Professional configuration above, Enterprise is the cheaper way to get all three AI products at six seats. That crossover is worth checking against your own headcount before assuming the mid tier is the value play.

None of those figures include Autopilot, which is metered per conversation on top of any of them.

Front's free trial

Front runs a free 14-day trial with all the features in the Professional plan, no credit card required to start, continue, or complete it. The pricing page lists no free tier below Starter, so when the trial ends the shared inbox stops being free.

What Front is good at

Front is a shared inbox and team collaboration product, and it is one of the better ones. The core idea, that internal comments, shared drafts, assignments and real-time availability belong inside the same thread as the customer conversation, is well executed and it is what teams stay for. It handles operational email at volume: logistics coordinators, account managers, agencies, teams where the same customer thread involves three internal people who need to agree before anyone replies.

That is a different product from an ecommerce support agent. Front is built to make a team of humans faster at a shared queue. It bills for the humans, and its AI products are largely designed to assist those humans (draft, translate, summarize, score) rather than to remove them from the loop. Autopilot is the exception and it is the one priced per conversation rather than per seat, which tells you something about how Front thinks about the two models.

If your support load is genuinely collaborative and human-driven, this is a reasonable thing to pay for and the per-seat model is honest about what you are buying. Front publishing its Enterprise per-seat rate at all deserves credit in a category built on quote-gating.

Who the per-seat shared inbox model suits badly

A small ecommerce store, mostly.

The per-seat model prices support by how many people you employ. An online store's support cost is driven by order volume, and those two numbers come apart fast. A two-person store doing 4,000 orders a month has enormous ticket volume and almost no headcount, so it pays $50 a month on Starter for a tool that assumes humans will answer all of it. The tool is not the bottleneck; the two humans are. Buying more seats does not help because there is nobody to sit in them.

The same model punishes the opposite case too. If you have six people who each spend twenty minutes a day in the inbox, you pay six full seats. Front's guest accounts help at the margins, but anyone who needs to reply rather than comment needs a license.

Three specific mismatches for a Shopify or WooCommerce store:

Starter's single channel type. A storefront chat widget and an email address are two channel types. That puts a small store on Professional at $65 a seat to do the most basic version of ecommerce support, which is a real jump from the headline $25.

AI is a second bill with its own logic. Copilot, Smart QA and Smart CSAT scale per seat. Autopilot, the one that resolves conversations without a human, scales per conversation from $0.05 and Front does not publish the tiers above that. Budgeting a year of Front means modelling headcount and conversation volume separately, and only one of those is a number you control.

No order-level integration is priced in. Front does not sell an ecommerce order lookup as part of its plans on the pricing page. Answering "where is my order" still means someone tabbing into Shopify, which is exactly the ticket type that dominates a store's queue.

If your support queue is mostly humans coordinating on complex threads, Front's model matches your cost structure and the price is fair for what it does. If your queue is mostly repetitive order and product questions and your headcount is two people, you are paying for seats to solve a volume problem.

The other pricing model

The alternative is billing by conversation instead of by person. Ernest is an AI support agent for Shopify and WooCommerce stores and prices that way: a free plan with 100 conversations that never expire, then $49 a month for 500 conversations, $149 for 2,000, and $299 for 10,000. AI is included at every tier, and there are no per-seat charges, so adding a part-time helper does not change the bill.

It connects to the live store rather than sitting beside it. Order lookups, product search over the live catalog, and the store's own policies come from the Shopify or WooCommerce connection, and cancellations and returns can run automatically or behind one-click merchant approval. Refunds always require approval.

The honest limits: Ernest covers the storefront chat widget and email with escalation to a human by email, and nothing else. No WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS or voice, all of which Front's Professional and Enterprise plans handle. There is no shared inbox built for internal collaboration, no macros, no agent QA scoring, and no helpdesk or CRM integrations. If your team's problem is coordinating six people across a complex queue, Front solves that and Ernest does not try to.

For the wider field, our roundup of customer service software for small businesses covers tools priced on both models, and the Intercom alternatives and Zendesk alternatives comparisons walk through the two other big per-seat platforms a store usually shortlists alongside Front.

Prices in this article come from Front's public pricing page as of publication and reflect annual billing. Front changes them, so check the source before you sign anything.