Help Scout Pricing: The Tiers, the Contact Limit, and $0.75 Per AI Resolution

Help Scout publishes a price for every plan it sells, which already puts it ahead of most of this category. As of publication, Help Scout's pricing page lists Standard at $25 per user per month, Plus at $45 per user per month, and Pro at $75 per user per month, with a free plan underneath all three.

Two meters sit alongside those seat prices, and they are where the interesting part of Help Scout's billing lives. The free plan is capped by contacts rather than by conversations or by messages, and Help Scout defines that unit precisely on its own comparison table. Separately, the AI Answers chatbot is billed at $0.75 per resolution on top of any plan, on every tier including Pro. Neither of those numbers scales with headcount, so a Help Scout bill is really two independent things added together.

One caveat on the seat figures. The page carries a Monthly/Annual toggle advertising 16% off for annual billing, and it does not label which term the displayed $25, $45 and $75 belong to. The FAQ shows the same pattern on add-ons, quoting extra Inboxes at "$10 per month when paid annually (or $12 per month)". Treat the three headline numbers as the pricing page's displayed figures as of publication and confirm the billing term before you budget against them.

The four plans

Every figure in that table comes from Help Scout's own pricing page as of publication.

The free plan, and what a contact is

Help Scout's free plan gives you 5 users, 1 Inbox, and 1 Docs site. It also gives you 10 saved replies, 10 tags, 10 knowledge base articles, one Beacon widget, 30 days of reporting history, and a limit of one integration from the 100+ app directory.

The binding constraint is none of those. It is 100 contacts a month.

Help Scout's definition, quoted from the comparison table: a contact is "someone who received a reply from your team or had their question resolved by the AI assistant. Multiple conversations with the same person count as one contact."

Read that twice, because it determines how quickly the free plan runs out for your particular store. The meter counts unique people, not messages and not threads. A customer who emails you four times in a month about the same delayed order is one contact. The unit rewards depth of relationship and punishes breadth.

That is worth understanding even if you never use the free plan, because it shows how Help Scout thinks about support. Most tools in this category meter conversations, tickets, or resolutions, which are transaction counts. A contact is a person count.

Help Scout does not publish an overage rate for contacts, or what happens on the free plan when you pass 100 in a month. The comparison table lists the limit and the paid tiers list "Unlimited". If you plan to run near that line, ask before you rely on it.

Standard, $25 per user per month

Standard is where the contact meter disappears and the seat meter takes over completely. Contacts go unlimited, saved replies and tags go unlimited, articles go unlimited, and the plan supports up to 25 users.

It is a fuller product than the price suggests. Standard includes multiple Inboxes (2 included, up to 20, extra ones at $10/mo), live chat and SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, multiple knowledge bases (2 Docs sites, extra ones at $20/mo), one basic SLA policy, 150 basic workflows, 5 Beacon widgets, 2 years of reporting history, unlimited AI Assist for editing and translating text, and the AI Inbox assistant. Phone and voice, and SMS, are listed as available via integration rather than natively, on Standard and above.

Three people on Standard is $75 a month. That is a genuinely competitive number for a shared inbox with a knowledge base and social channels attached.

Plus, $45 per user per month

Plus is the tier most growing teams land on, and Help Scout marks it as the popular one. The jump from $25 to $45 is an 80% increase in the per-seat rate, so for a five-person team it is the difference between $125 and $225 a month.

What the extra $20 a seat buys: advanced workflows (500 of them, triggered on customer properties rather than just conversation state), two advanced SLA policies, a secure customer portal, unlimited AI Drafts and AI Summarize, round robin routing, Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot integrations, internal teams, grouping conversations by company, all-time reporting history, 5 Inboxes, 3 Docs sites, unlimited Beacon widgets, and a 400 calls/minute API limit.

Plus also introduces light users, which is the closest thing Help Scout has to a way out of pure seat pricing. Light users can view conversations and collaborate without taking a full seat. The comparison table lists 5 included on Plus with a maximum of 25, and 15 included on Pro with a maximum of 50. Help Scout does not publish what light users cost beyond the included allotment, so if you were planning to put a warehouse manager and three part-time helpers on light seats, that is a sales question.

Pro, $75 per user per month, minimum 10 seats

Pro is the only plan with a published seat floor. Users are listed as "Unlimited (minimum 10)", which multiplied out against the $75 rate puts the entry price at $750 a month before any AI usage.

It adds unlimited workflows, unlimited SLA policies, multiple routing types (round robin plus load balanced), SSO/SAML, HIPAA compliance, up to 50 light users, a dedicated onboarding specialist, a strategic account manager, and preferred pricing on Aircall. Reporting is all-time and the API limit doubles again to 800 calls/minute.

One inconsistency worth flagging: the tier summary lists SSO/SAML and HIPAA compliance as Pro features, while the detailed comparison table marks some security items as add-ons rather than included. Help Scout does not publish add-on prices for SSO, IP restrictions, HIPAA, the onboarding specialist, or the CSM, so if any of those are the reason you are looking at Pro, get the quote rather than assuming the $75 covers it.

Pro is also the only plan where the buying motion changes. Standard and Plus have "Try for Free" buttons. Pro has "Book a Demo", and the 15-day self-serve trial covers Standard and Plus only.

AI Answers: $0.75 per resolution

AI Answers is Help Scout's autonomous chatbot, sold as an add-on at $0.75 per resolution on Standard, Plus and Pro alike. Pre-paid discounts are available; Help Scout does not publish the discount schedule.

The definition of a resolution is unusually favourable to the buyer, and Help Scout deserves credit for how tightly it is drawn. From the FAQ: a resolution is a single conversation resolved by AI Answers without human assistance, and it counts only if the customer receives an AI response and does not escalate, search the knowledge base, ask more questions, or indicate they need more help. If the customer asks for more help in natural language or clicks "I still need help", the conversation is not billed. You are charged once per conversation even if the AI answers several questions inside it.

That is a meter that only ticks when the AI genuinely finished the job. Plenty of vendors bill per conversation the bot touches.

Two more things about the AI billing. You can set a monthly spending cap on resolutions; hit it and AI Answers switches off for the rest of the cycle, with email warnings as you approach it. And every new account gets three months of free, unlimited AI Answers resolutions, starting on the day the account is created rather than the day you switch the feature on. If you spend your first two months configuring the shared inbox, you have burned two thirds of the AI trial without testing the AI.

Help Scout's own savings calculator states an average resolution rate of 73%. Using that figure against a store doing 1,200 conversations a month: 876 resolutions at $0.75 is $657 a month in AI charges, sitting on top of whatever the seats cost.

The add-ons that move the bill

Beyond AI, three published line items:

Extra Inboxes. $10 per month paid annually, $12 monthly. Standard includes 2, Plus 5, Pro 10.

Extra Docs sites. $20 per month paid annually, $24 monthly. Standard includes 2, Plus 3, Pro 5.

Aircall for phone and SMS, listed as an add-on on Standard and Plus and at preferred pricing on Pro. The Aircall cost itself is not published by Help Scout.

Help Scout also runs a discount program for qualifying non-profits and B Corporations, plus a startup plan for early-stage companies, neither with published rates.

What Help Scout is genuinely good at

Help Scout is well liked, and the reasons hold up. It made shared inboxes feel like email instead of like a ticketing system, and that decision has aged well: customers get a normal-looking reply rather than a case number, and agents work in something they already understand. The onboarding claim on the pricing page, that you can learn the platform in under an hour, is not far off.

The AI billing is honest in a way that is rare. Charging only for resolutions the customer accepted, publishing that definition in detail, and shipping a hard spending cap are all decisions that cost the vendor money and buy the customer predictability.

And Help Scout publishes real numbers for all three paid tiers, including the top one. No "contact sales" wall at the mid tier.

Who this pricing model suits badly

A store with lots of one-off shoppers.

The contact definition on the free plan and the resolution meter on AI Answers push in the same direction: both are cheapest when the same people come back. Multiple conversations with one contact are one contact. One resolved conversation is one $0.75 charge whether that person spends $30 once or $3,000 a year.

Run the two shapes side by side. A B2B software company with 400 accounts might talk to the same 150 people all year; on the free plan those 150 are well inside 100 contacts a month at any realistic contact rate, and each AI resolution serves someone with years of revenue behind them. A consumer store selling phone cases to 900 different buyers a month has 900 potential contacts, almost none of whom will ever write in twice. The free plan's 100-contact ceiling is gone in the first week. Every AI resolution costs the same $0.75 whether the order was $18 or $180, which on a low-margin, high-volume catalogue is a per-ticket cost you have to weigh against the ticket's actual value.

The seat side has the same mismatch for a different reason. Per-user pricing charges by how many people you employ, and a small store's support load is set by order volume rather than headcount. Two people running 4,000 orders a month pay $50 on Standard for a tool that assumes humans will answer everything. The tool is affordable; the two humans are the bottleneck, and buying more seats does not fix that because there is nobody to sit in them.

There is also nothing in the published plans that answers "where is my order" against a live Shopify or WooCommerce store. Help Scout lists 100+ integrations, Salesforce, Jira, HubSpot, Linear, and a custom apps framework for pulling third-party data into the sidebar. Order lookup is not a priced feature of the plans themselves, so the most common ecommerce ticket still routes to a person with a browser tab open.

The other way to price this

Billing by conversation rather than by person or by unique contact is the alternative. Ernest is an AI support agent for Shopify and WooCommerce stores and prices that way: a free plan with 100 conversations that never expire (a real free plan, not a trial), then $49 a month for 500 conversations, $149 for 2,000, and $299 for 10,000. AI is included at every tier, there are no per-seat charges, and no separate per-resolution meter, so the bill does not change when you hire a part-timer or when a shopper never comes back.

It connects to the store rather than sitting beside it. Order lookups, product search across the live catalogue, and the store's own policies come from the Shopify or WooCommerce connection. Cancellations and returns can run fully automatic or behind one-click merchant approval; refunds always require approval.

The honest limits, because a comparison that skips them is not worth reading: 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 Help Scout supports natively or via integration on Standard and above. There is no shared inbox designed for a team of agents collaborating on threads, no SLA policies, no workflow builder, and no Salesforce, Jira or HubSpot integrations. If your support operation is five people working a shared queue across six channels, Help Scout is built for that and Ernest is not.

If the model does not fit and you want the switching version of this comparison, see our Help Scout alternative for Shopify stores. Front pricing breaks down a similar per-seat structure, and our roundup of customer service software for small businesses covers the wider field.

Every price in this article comes from Help Scout's public pricing page as of publication. Vendors change them, so check the source before you sign anything.