Trengo Alternative for Small Stores: When the Cheapest Plan Starts at 10 Seats
Trengo's entry plan is €299/month for 10 users, and AI conversations carry a surcharge. A Trengo alternative for stores that want an agent, not an inbox.
Trengo's cheapest plan is Boost, and as of publication its pricing page lists it at €299 per month billed annually, or €349 month to month, with 10 users included. If the support team at your store is you plus a part-timer who covers weekends, that entry price is packaged for eight people you don't have.
That seat floor is one of three things that send people searching for a Trengo alternative. The second is the AI: HelpMate is included in every plan, but conversations that use it carry a surcharge on top of the plan. The third is more of a shape mismatch than a price complaint. Trengo sells a shared inbox that a team works in, and some stores want a single agent that resolves the question and never lands in an inbox at all.
Every Trengo figure below comes from Trengo's own pricing page, in euros. That page also toggles to USD and GBP, and since it doesn't publish those figures alongside the euro ones, nothing here is converted.
What Trengo does well, and it's a lot
Trengo is a multichannel team inbox, and the channel breadth is the product. Per its pricing page, every tier includes the unified inbox for email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and more, the official WhatsApp Business API, and a website widget. Voice calling, making and receiving phone calls from inside Trengo, is available as an add-on on Boost and Pro and as a full integration on Enterprise. Broadcasting, for proactive campaigns over messaging platforms, is an add-on across all three tiers.
For a business where customers genuinely message across four or five channels, that consolidation is worth real money. One agent answering a WhatsApp thread, an Instagram DM, and a website chat from the same screen, with @mentions and internal comments in the thread and role-based permissions on who can see what, is a coordination problem solved. Trengo's page says it's trusted by 1500+ companies worldwide, and the customer logos on that page skew heavily European and toward travel, hospitality, and leisure: ANWB, Van der Valk, EuroParcs, Ferryscanner, Spabreaks.
The AI layer isn't an afterthought either. HelpMate, Trengo's AI agent, is listed on every tier including entry-level Boost, alongside AI Journeys for multi-step automated flows across channels (currently in beta, with Trengo noting that final pricing and packaging may change) and AI Reporting to see how the AI is resolving questions. Trengo's own Shopify integration page describes bringing customer context into conversations and giving the AI agent real-time catalog access for stock checks and product recommendations, so it isn't a generic FAQ bot bolted onto an inbox.
One thing to settle before going further, because it decides this whole page for a lot of readers: if a meaningful share of your customer conversations arrive over WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, or the phone, stay with Trengo. Ernest has none of those channels. Not as a roadmap item, not behind a higher tier. Ernest covers the storefront chat widget and email, full stop. A multichannel inbox is a job it does not do, and no amount of pricing comparison changes that.
What Trengo costs
The tier structure, as published:
Boost is €299/month billed annually or €349 month to month. It includes 10 users and either 6,000 conversations per year on the annual plan or 500 conversations per month on the monthly plan.
Pro is €499/month billed annually or €599 month to month. It includes 20 users and either 18,000 conversations per year or 1,500 per month, depending on billing. Pro adds live chat and phone support from Trengo, API-based AI actions, developer access for custom channel integrations, and optional mandatory 2FA.
Enterprise is custom priced with custom user and conversation counts, and it's the only tier that includes a dedicated success manager and full voice integration rather than a voice add-on.
The billing unit matters more than usual here. Trengo defines a conversation as any reply to an inbound or outbound message with a customer within a 7-day window, with messages outside that window starting a new conversation. So a customer who asks about their order on Monday and follows up nine days later has generated two billable conversations, not one.
Beyond the included allowance, extra conversations are €18 per 100 on monthly billing or €15 per 100 annually. Extra users are €30 per user on Boost and €50 per user on Pro monthly, dropping to €25 and €40 on annual billing.
And the line that most affects a store planning to lean on the AI: conversations with an AI surcharge are billed at €0.30 per conversation monthly, or €0.25 annually.
The three reasons stores go looking
Seats you don't fill. Ten included users at Boost is generous for a ten-person team and irrelevant for a two-person one. The pricing structure assumes the constraint on your support operation is how many people can work the queue at once. For a store where the constraint is that nobody is available at 11pm when a shopper wants to know if the boots run narrow, seat capacity isn't the thing you're short of.
AI billed as a variable on top. HelpMate being included on every tier reads well until you get to the add-on table, where AI-surcharged conversations cost €0.30 each on monthly billing. That's a per-use meter on the part of the system doing the automation, which means the more successfully you automate, the more the meter runs. Trengo also notes that additional WhatsApp, Voice, and SMS conversations carrying an AI surcharge are billed at their respective rates, with "charges apply per usage" and no published number, so the ceiling on that line isn't something you can model from the pricing page. There's a similar dynamic at Tidio, where the Lyro AI quota is a separate bill from the chat plan — different mechanism, same budgeting headache.
You wanted an agent, not a queue. This is the one that has nothing to do with price. A shared inbox is infrastructure for humans replying to customers. If your goal is that most order-status, returns, and sizing questions never reach a human at all, the inbox is scaffolding around the part you actually want. Worth noting too that on Boost, Trengo's page lists third-party AI actions as "not supported" and custom integrations as "not supported"; API actions arrive at Pro. So the entry tier's AI answers questions rather than triggering external systems.
What Trengo doesn't publish
Two gaps worth naming rather than guessing at. The pricing page lists no free plan and no free trial, on any tier. And every plan's call to action is "Book a demo" or "Contact sales" rather than a signup button, which tells you the intended motion is a sales conversation, not a self-serve install this afternoon. Neither is a flaw. They're just facts about who the product is sold to, and a two-person store that wants to try something tonight is not that buyer.
Where Ernest fits
Ernest is an AI agent for Shopify and WooCommerce stores, and it plays three roles from a single connection: support agent for order status, returns, and cancellations; sales agent for the pre-purchase questions that stall a checkout, like sizing, shipping cost, and stock; and product agent for specs, materials, and how-to questions. Connect a Shopify store and it imports the catalog and policies automatically, then ingests the rest of the site's content and FAQs.
Order actions run one of two ways per action, merchant's choice: fully automatic, or one-click approval. Refunds are the exception and are always approval-gated, so money never moves without a merchant clicking. Before going live, you can replay past support tickets against Ernest in simulation and read how it would have answered them.
Pricing is volume-based, in dollars: a free plan at $0 with 100 conversations that never expire (a real free plan, not a trial), then $49/month for 500 conversations, $149/month for 2,000, and $299/month for 10,000. AI is included at every tier with no surcharge per AI-handled conversation, and there are no per-seat fees at all. Since Trengo publishes in euros and Ernest prices in dollars, those two ladders aren't directly comparable currency for currency, but the structural difference stands on its own: one number that moves with conversation volume, versus a plan price plus seat count plus conversation overage plus an AI surcharge.
The honest cons, which are what make the rest of this worth anything:
- No WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, or phone. Trengo has all of them and Ernest has none. This is the biggest gap on the page and it isn't close.
- No helpdesk, CRM, or ERP integrations, and no custom channel builds. Trengo's Pro and Enterprise tiers offer API access and custom integrations for exactly this. Ernest doesn't have an equivalent.
- Not a team inbox. If you have six agents who need assignment rules, internal comments, and agent performance reporting, Ernest is the wrong shape. It's built around resolving conversations, not distributing them.
- No outbound. Trengo sells broadcasting as an add-on for proactive campaigns. Ernest does nothing proactive: no campaigns, no cart-abandonment sequences, no lifecycle messages.
How to decide
Two questions settle it faster than a demo of either.
Where do your conversations actually arrive? Pull last month and count by channel. If WhatsApp, Instagram, and phone add up to a real share, Trengo is doing a job Ernest can't, and the cost of a 10-seat plan is the price of consolidating them. If the honest answer is that nearly everything comes through the website widget and the support inbox, you're paying for channel coverage you don't use.
Do you want the queue answered faster, or answered less? Trengo's structure makes a team faster at working a shared queue. If what you want is that most routine questions get resolved without anyone opening a queue, a store-aware agent is the tool for that, and the seat count stops being the unit you're buying.
If you land on the second answer for both, Ernest installs from the Shopify App Store and the free plan's 100 conversations are enough to see how it handles your real questions before any money changes hands. For a wider look at the field before committing, our roundup of customer service software for small businesses covers the alternatives, and what an AI sales agent for Shopify does walks through the pre-purchase side that a support inbox tends to leave alone.