Help Scout Pricing 2026: Plans, Free Tier and AI Costs
Help Scout is per user again. After a stretch of billing by “contacts helped” that drove some long-time customers away, new accounts now pay a set price for each team member, plus a usage fee for the AI chatbot.
The short verdict: Help Scout costs $25, $45 or $75 per user per month billed annually ($30, $54 or $90 month to month), with a free plan for up to 5 users and 100 contacts a month. The catch is that the best AI features sit on Plus, the customer-facing AI bot bills $0.75 per resolution on top, and Pro needs 10 seats minimum. If you are a founder answering customer email yourself and don’t need a help desk yet, Carly starts at $35/month and can give you an AI email agent with its own address.
Help Scout plans at a glance
Prices as listed on Help Scout’s pricing page on September 29, 2026, per user per month. The page opens on the Annual toggle (marked “-16%”), so the low figures are the annual ones.
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | User cap | AI included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 5 users, 100 contacts/mo | None |
| Standard | $25 | $30 | 25 users | AI Assist (edit, shorten, translate) |
| Plus | $45 | $54 | 50 users | AI Assist, AI Drafts, AI Summarize |
| Pro | $75 | $90 | Minimum 10 users | Same as Plus |
| AI Answers (add-on) | $0.75 per resolution | $0.75 per resolution | Paid plans | Customer-facing AI bot |
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| What it is | Shared inbox and help desk: email, live chat, social channels, a Docs knowledge base and the Beacon widget |
| Billed by | Users (seats). Older accounts may still be on contact-based plans |
| Free plan | Yes: 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts a month, no AI |
| Trial | 15 days of Standard or Plus, no card. Pro trials go through sales |
| Best for | Support teams of roughly 3 to 50 people who want email-first support without Zendesk’s complexity |
| Biggest limitation | AI drafting starts at Plus, AI answers are metered, and pricing has changed repeatedly |
Free plan
The Free plan covers 5 users, 1 shared inbox, 1 Docs site with 10 articles, 10 saved replies, 10 tags and 30 days of reporting history. It caps you at 100 contacts a month, where a contact is anyone who got a reply from your team. It has no AI tools, no live chat, no API access and no data exports, and it allows one integration.
When Help Scout first launched a free tier, developer Daniel Jalkut flagged the same problem: “the big problem with the free tier is that it removes access to the Help Scout API, and the ability to ‘Export’ your data.” It is still true on today’s comparison table.
Standard: $25 per user billed annually
Standard adds live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, 2 inboxes, 2 Docs sites, 150 basic workflows, one basic SLA policy, custom reports, API access and the AI Assist writing tool. There is no contact cap. It stops at 25 users, and it lacks AI Drafts, AI Summarize, round-robin routing and the Salesforce, HubSpot and Jira integrations.
Plus: $45 per user billed annually
Plus is where Help Scout’s agent-side AI lives. It adds AI Drafts (replies drafted from past conversations and Docs articles, with no per-draft charge on current plans), AI Summarize, 500 advanced workflows, two advanced SLA policies, round-robin routing, the Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira and Linear integrations, 5 inboxes, 3 Docs sites and 5 light users who can view and collaborate without a full seat. It caps at 50 users.
Accounts still on older user-based plans pay separately for drafting: Help Scout’s AI Drafts billing doc lists “$50 per 100 conversations where an AI-generated draft is created.”
Pro: $75 per user billed annually, 10 seats minimum
Pro adds SSO/SAML, HIPAA compliance, IP restrictions, no cap on workflows or SLA policies, load-balanced routing, 10 inboxes, 5 Docs sites, 15 included light users, a dedicated onboarding specialist and an account manager. Because of the 10-user floor, the cheapest Pro account is $750 a month billed annually ($9,000 a year). You book a demo to buy it.
AI Answers: $0.75 per resolution
AI Answers is the customer-facing bot inside the Beacon widget. Help Scout’s AI resolutions pricing doc says you are “billed $0.75 per resolution each month,” charged only when the bot answers and the customer doesn’t ask for more help, and at most once per session. You can set a monthly spending cap; when you hit it, the bot switches off until the next cycle.
Two details are easy to miss. New accounts get a free 3-month AI Answers trial, but the same doc says “Existing Help Scout customers do not receive a trial period.” And resolutions are billed in arrears and, on annual plans, deducted from your prepaid credit, so “your annual credit will be used up faster than a year.”
What Help Scout really costs
- Josh, a solo founder: Free works while he helps fewer than 100 people a month and doesn’t need AI or exports. On Standard he pays $300 a year billed annually or $360 paying monthly. Turn on AI Answers and 100 resolutions a month adds $75 a month once the trial ends.
- Emily’s 5-person support team on Plus: $225 a month billed annually ($2,700 a year) or $270 a month paying monthly ($3,240 a year). If AI Answers resolves 300 chats a month, add $225 a month, which doubles the bill.
- A 20-person team: Plus is $900 a month billed annually ($10,800 a year). Pro, for SSO and HIPAA, is $1,500 a month ($18,000 a year).
Add $10 a month per extra inbox ($12 monthly), $20 per extra Docs site ($24 monthly) and $10 per extra light user ($12 monthly), per Help Scout’s annual payments doc.
Pricing gotchas to check before you sign up
Inboxes are rationed. Standard includes 2. Joost de Valk, who moved his company off Help Scout in 2024, wrote that “We needed more than two inboxes, but we decided against using more and changed our process a bit because the cost would otherwise have gone up to $160 a month.”
User caps force upgrades. Standard stops at 25 users and Plus at 50. The 26th agent moves everyone to Plus, not just the new hire.
Annual renews automatically. Card-paid annual plans auto-renew for the users and add-ons you have at renewal. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first payment only.
Signup can involve vetting. A Trustpilot reviewer in July 2026 described being asked for their website, LinkedIn and team size before they could finish registering: “This feels like way too much just to register.”
Discounts exist. Non-profits get 10%, stackable with annual billing, and mission-focused organizations can apply for up to 100% off, per the billing and plans guide. Tech startups under two years old with under $1M ARR can get six months free through the startup program.
The contact-based pricing detour
In spring 2025, Help Scout began notifying existing customers that they would move to billing by contacts helped, with six months’ notice. Jalkut worked through a hypothetical three-person team helping 500 customers a month: “Under current Help Scout pricing, I would pay $66/month… But under the new pricing structure, the minimum cost is $266/month.”
Help Scout has since returned new accounts to per-user plans. Its help center now keeps a separate guide for contact-based accounts, which bills on a three-month rolling average of contacts, and says of the current model that “All user based plans are billed on a per User per month basis.” If your account dates from the contact-based period, check which model you are on before comparing prices.
What users say about Help Scout’s price
Help Scout holds a 3.4 out of 5 on Trustpilot, and most of the pricing reviews cluster around the contact-based change.
Where it earns its price
- “an alternative option to overpriced enterprise level EMS options” (Trustpilot, January 2024)
- “Helpscout has everything we needed in one place which is a huge time saver for our team of 5 support agents.” (Trustpilot, December 2025)
- “Cheapest by far in pricing with all the bells and whistles.” (Trustpilot, August 2025, written while that account was on per-contact billing)
- Even Jalkut, while criticizing the change, wrote that “I have been convinced that they are the best at what they do.”
Where people get stuck
- “They just announced they are ‘upgrading’ our plan from 1500 a year to over 7500 a year… we have two dedicated support team members, and no reason to use AI drafts because customers hate not talking to an actual person.” (Trustpilot, April 2025)
- “We would have landed in the $150 to $250/month range. That’s a ridiculous price for… a shared inbox.” (the Piwigo team, explaining their move to FreeScout)
Our read: people like the product. The complaints are about pricing that kept changing, not the per-user price itself.
Help Scout vs Carly
| Help Scout | Carly | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Help desk and shared inbox for a support team | AI executive assistant that works over email, text and the web |
| Entry price | Free (5 users), then $25/user/mo billed annually | Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month |
| Customer-facing AI | AI Answers bot, $0.75 per resolution | Email Agents, each with its own email address |
| Where you work | Help Scout’s inbox | Your own Gmail or Outlook inbox |
| Best for | Teams with SLAs, a Docs site and several agents | Founders and small teams answering customers themselves |
A 10-agent support team with SLAs, routing and a public knowledge base should buy Help Scout. A founder answering support email between everything else often doesn’t need a help desk yet.
That founder can create an Email Agent in Carly: a separate AI agent with its own email address customers can write to, its own instructions, knowledge files you upload, and access to only the tools you allow. Carly also triages and drafts replies in your main inbox, runs workflows triggered by new emails or form submissions, and connects to thousands of apps, including Help Scout, Slack, HubSpot, Shopify and Stripe (see integrations). If you are weighing a team setup, book a call with the Carly team.
Who should pay for Help Scout
- Pay for it if you have three or more people answering customers, want a Docs site and chat widget in the same tool, and need SLAs or routing.
- Pick Plus over Standard if you want AI drafting included; on Standard you only get the AI writing helper.
- Look elsewhere if you are one person answering email (try the Free plan or Carly), if you need a pure shared inbox (see our best shared inbox tools and Front pricing breakdown), or if you want a bigger suite (Zendesk alternatives, Intercom alternatives).
FAQ
How much does Help Scout cost per month? As of September 29, 2026, Standard is $25 per user per month billed annually or $30 monthly, Plus is $45 or $54, and Pro is $75 or $90 with a 10-user minimum. AI Answers adds $0.75 per resolution.
Is there a Help Scout free plan? Yes. It covers 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site and 100 contacts a month, with no AI tools, API access or data exports. If AI answering customer email is the part you want, Carly has free Zapier-style workflows, with AI agents from $35/month.
Does Help Scout charge per contact or per user? New accounts are billed per user. Some accounts that moved to contact-based billing in 2025 are still on it; the account owner can check under Your Plan.
How much do Help Scout’s AI features cost? AI Assist is included on every paid plan. AI Drafts and AI Summarize are included on Plus and Pro. AI Answers, the customer-facing bot, is $0.75 per resolution with an optional monthly cap, and new accounts get 3 months free.
Is Help Scout worth it for a small business? For a support team of three or more, usually yes: it is simpler and cheaper than Zendesk. For a solo founder, $25 to $54 a month plus AI fees buys a lot of help-desk features you won’t use yet. An Email Agent in Carly gives you an AI-answered support address without the help desk.
Related: Best Help Scout integrations · AI automation tools for Help Scout · Front review · Front alternatives · Missive pricing
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