Gorgias Pricing: Two Meters, Four Tiers, and Where the Overage Bites

Gorgias sells one bill with two meters running underneath it. There is a ticket allowance and an automated-interaction allowance, each with its own included volume and its own overage rate, and the tier price covers both until you cross either line. Most of the confusion about Gorgias pricing comes from reading the tier price as the bill.

The good news for anyone budgeting is that Gorgias publishes almost all of it. Four tiers with prices, both included allowances, both overage rates, and a feature comparison table are all on the public page. That is more transparency than most of the category offers.

All figures below come from Gorgias's own pricing page as of publication. Gorgias repackages periodically, so check the page before signing.

The four published plans

Automated interaction overage is $1.50 on every one of the four tiers. Unlike the ticket rate, which drops from $0.40 to $0.36 when you reach Pro, the AI meter has no volume discount at any published tier.

Gorgias marks Pro as "Most popular" and attaches a count of 12,400+ brands to it. Starter, Basic, and Pro all carry a free trial, with Basic and Pro noting no credit card required. Advanced routes to a 30-minute sales call instead.

The line-item split behind each tier price

Gorgias breaks every tier into two components, Helpdesk and AI Agent, and shows what each costs. This is the part that explains where the numbers come from:

Two things worth catching there. On Starter, the components sum to the $40 monthly price, which tracks because Starter is monthly billing only. On the other three, the components sum to the annual-billed monthly rate, not the month-to-month rate. If you pay monthly on Basic you pay $90, not the $77 the component split implies.

The second oddity: the AI Agent component costs $30 on Starter and $27 on Basic. The cheaper plan's AI line is more expensive than the tier above it, and both carry the same 30 included automated interactions. Whatever the reason, it means Starter is a poor way to buy AI Agent specifically.

Annual commitment saves roughly 14% on Basic ($924 against $1,080 paid monthly), 14% on Pro ($5,652 against $6,600), and 14% on Advanced ($14,724 against $17,160).

What counts as a ticket, and what counts as an automated interaction

This is the mechanism that decides your bill, and it is where the pricing page gets thinner than the tier table.

Gorgias describes the helpdesk as scaling "from 50 to 5,000 tickets a month, never priced per agent," and describes AI Agent as billing on resolution: "AI Agent on every plan, pay only when it resolves a conversation." A ticket is a customer conversation landing in the helpdesk. An automated interaction is AI Agent doing something with one.

What the pricing page does not spell out is whether a conversation AI Agent resolves also consumes a ticket from your helpdesk allowance, or whether the two meters count the same conversation once each. That distinction changes an estimate substantially at high automation rates, and I am not going to guess at it. Ask in the demo and get the answer in writing.

For the add-on channels, Gorgias is precise about counting. A conversation becomes a Voice ticket the moment a call connects, and follow-up calls on that ticket are unlimited at no extra charge. SMS works the same way: the ticket starts when a text is exchanged, and follow-up texts on it are free.

Where the overage bites

Run a store on Basic at $90 a month billed monthly. November arrives and inbound hits 700 tickets against the 300 included. That is 400 overage tickets at $0.40, so $160. AI Agent handles 250 of those conversations against 30 included automated interactions, so 220 at $1.50, another $330. The invoice is $580 on a $90 plan.

Nothing about that is a gotcha. Both rates are published, both allowances are published, and the arithmetic is available to anyone who reads the page before signing. But the shape matters: the variable half of the bill is a function of how well the AI performs, and the AI meter is the expensive one. At $1.50 per automated interaction against $0.40 per ticket, a well-tuned Gorgias deployment generates more billable events than a badly tuned one.

The same pattern shows up at the top. Pro includes 2,000 tickets and 190 automated interactions for $550 monthly. If AI Agent resolves 600 conversations that month, the 410 past your allowance cost $615, which is more than the plan itself.

There is also a clean upgrade breakeven between the two smallest tiers. Starter at $40 plus $0.40 per ticket past 50 equals Basic's $90 monthly at exactly 175 tickets. Below that, Starter is cheaper. Above it, you are paying Basic's price for Starter's feature set, which includes only 3 user seats and locks out brand voice controls and AI Agent actions.

Seats, and what "never priced per agent" actually means

Gorgias genuinely does not bill by seat, and for a support team of five or six that is a meaningful structural advantage over Zendesk-style per-agent pricing. The comparison table confirms it: Basic, Pro, and Advanced all list 500 user seats.

The caveat sits on Starter, which caps at 3 user seats. So the claim holds as a billing statement (adding an agent does not raise your bill) but there is a headcount ceiling on the entry tier. Anyone with a fourth person answering tickets is on Basic or above regardless of volume.

What separates the tiers on features

All four tiers get email, live chat, contact form, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok Shop, and WhatsApp. All four get Shopify and Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, unlimited multi-stores, the 254-app integration library, HTTP and custom integrations, Klaviyo, Yotpo, Recharge, Smile, macros, rules, intent and sentiment detection, chat campaigns, 10 Help Centers, SSO, and an API rate limit of 2 requests per second.

The actual gates are narrower than the price gaps suggest:

• Starter is missing BigCommerce, brand voice and guardrails on AI Agent, AI Agent actions (cancel, discount, apply), and audit logs.
• Basic adds BigCommerce, brand voice, and AI actions, but still has no audit logs.
• Pro adds Magento and audit logs.
• Advanced adds volume and dedicated support rather than new features in the comparison table.

Flows, Order Management, and AI and automation statistics are all listed as requiring AI Agent, which every plan includes. AI Agent comes pre-trained on 18+ verticals across all four tiers.

Add-ons and Enterprise

Voice starts at $25 a month on annual pricing. SMS starts at $17 a month on annual pricing. Both scale with call and text volume, and both work on any plan. Gorgias does not publish the per-ticket or extra-ticket rates for either add-on on the pricing page; the estimator that would show them requires you to input your own volume. If Voice or SMS is central to your plan, treat those starting prices as a floor and get a quote.

Enterprise carries no published price at all. It is aimed at teams over 5,000 conversations a month and adds SSO with SAML, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, unlimited Help Centers, an API rate limit of 4 requests per second (double the 2 per second on published tiers), a custom DPA or MSA with security review support, a dedicated CSM and solutions architect, new Actions and custom automations, and proactive knowledge-gap detection. Anyone quoting you an Enterprise number from a blog post is inventing it.

What the money buys

Gorgias is the strongest ecommerce-native helpdesk in this category and a pricing page that skips that is selling you something. The Shopify integration is the deepest reason people pick it: agents work order data inside the inbox, AI Agent takes actions like cancellations and discounts on Basic and above, and Gorgias claims it powers customer conversations for 40% of Shopify brands. The 254-app integration library covers the ecommerce stack most stores already run, including Klaviyo, Recharge, Yotpo, and Smile.

The channel coverage is also broad for the price. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok Shop are on every tier including the $40 one. Gorgias does not gate social channels behind a mid tier or an add-on the way it does Voice and SMS.

And the automation claims come with a named customer rather than a chart. Orthofeet's customer service lead says they targeted 30% automation in 30 days, "surpassed that and are now above 50% automation, and we're still climbing." One customer is not a benchmark, but a sourced quote beats an unsourced average.

If you are weighing Gorgias against the broader field rather than just pricing it, our roundup of Gorgias alternatives works through the migration side of that decision, and the best customer service software for small business covers the same question without assuming a helpdesk is the starting point.

Who the ticket-bundle model suits badly

Bundled ticket volume with metered overage works well for a store with predictable, mostly flat inbound and a support team large enough that not paying per seat is real money. If you run 250 tickets a month every month and have four agents, Basic at $90 is a good deal and nothing in this post argues otherwise.

It suits two shapes badly. The first is seasonal. Every ticket past your bundle is billed, so the months where your business works best are the months where support costs the most, and the bundle you sized for February is the wrong bundle in November. The second is a small store where AI does most of the work. The AI meter is the expensive one at $1.50 per automated interaction, included allowances are thin (30 on both Starter and Basic), and there is no volume discount on that rate at any published tier.

For that second shape, the comparison worth running is a ticket bundle plus two overage meters against flat conversation pricing. Both sides of that, quoted:

Ernest charges by conversation volume with AI included: free for 100 conversations that never expire, then $49/month for 500, $149/month for 2,000, and $299/month for 10,000. No per-seat charge and no per-resolution fee. Gorgias Pro is $550 a month billed monthly, or $471 a month on annual billing ($5,652 up front), and includes 2,000 tickets plus 190 automated interactions, with overage at $0.36 per ticket and $1.50 per automated interaction.

Two caveats, because half a comparison is a misleading one.

A Gorgias ticket and an Ernest conversation are different billing units and do not divide against each other cleanly. More importantly, Gorgias is a helpdesk and Ernest is not. There is no shared inbox for human agents, no macros, no rules engine, no ticket routing, no WFM. Ernest runs on Shopify and WooCommerce, on the storefront chat widget and email, with escalation to a human by email. No phone, no SMS, no WhatsApp, no Instagram, no TikTok Shop, and nothing resembling a 254-app integration library. If your team works tickets in a shared inbox all day, Gorgias is the product and Ernest is not a replacement for it.

The stores where the flat model wins are the ones where nobody is working an inbox all day. One or two people, a Shopify or WooCommerce store, and a queue that is mostly order status, returns, and pre-sale questions. There the ticket bundle is buying helpdesk infrastructure you do not staff, and the AI meter is charging most for the part doing most of the work.

Estimating your real bill

Four inputs, in the order that matters:

1. Tier price. Monthly or annual rate from the table above. Decide up front whether you are committing annually, because the component split on the pricing page reflects the annual rate and quietly understates a monthly bill.
2. Expected tickets minus your included allowance, at $0.40 (Starter, Basic) or $0.36 (Pro, Advanced). Use your peak month, not your average.
3. Expected automated interactions minus your included allowance, at $1.50 flat. For a store with a high automation rate this is usually the biggest line, and it grows as the AI improves.
4. Voice or SMS add-ons, from $25 and $17 a month respectively on annual pricing, plus per-ticket rates Gorgias does not publish.

Gorgias offers an ROI calculator on the pricing page. Run your own arithmetic against your actual peak-month volume first, then see whether the calculator agrees. If you are cross-shopping billing models rather than products, our breakdown of Zendesk pricing covers the per-agent-plus-per-resolution shape that Gorgias deliberately avoids.