Help Scout Pricing Explained: Plans and AI Answers

The free plan: genuinely useful, with one big catch

Most free plans in this category are demos. Help Scout's isn't.

You get up to 5 users, a shared inbox, and the Docs knowledge base, all at no cost. For a tiny team that mainly answers email, that's a real working setup, not a trial.

The catch is volume. The free plan caps you at 100 contacts per month. And there's no live chat at all on this tier — it's email only. If customers expect to catch you in a chat window, you'll need to pay.

Picture a two-person trades business using the free tier to keep quotes and follow-ups in one shared inbox. It can run that way for a long time — right up until the month they add a second channel or hit a seasonal rush, and the contact cap becomes the thing that forces a decision. That is the shape of the trade-off: the free plan is not a trial, but it is built for a steady, low, email-only volume.

Scout, Standard, and Plus: what each tier buys you

Help Scout's paid plans start at $25 per user per month when billed yearly. That's the entry point, and it's where most small teams land first.

From there, pricing climbs as you add features. The Plus tier runs $45 per user per month, and that's where the better AI tools live — AI Drafts and AI Summarize. On the lower paid plans, you get AI Assist, which is more of a writing helper than a full automation layer.

Then there's the Pro tier, and this is where things get real. Pro requires a 10-seat minimum, which puts the floor at $750 per month. That's not a typo. If you're a five-person shop, Pro isn't built for you, no matter how much you like the product.

Worth noticing before you upgrade: the jump from the entry paid tier to Plus is mostly about AI. If nobody on your team wants AI Drafts or Summarize, staying on the cheaper tier saves a meaningful amount per person over a year.

AI Answers: the $0.75 per resolution question

This is the part most people searching for Help Scout pricing actually want to understand.

AI Answers is Help Scout's automated response tool. It reads your Docs knowledge base and answers common customer questions without a human touching the ticket. You're billed $0.75 per resolution.

That number matters because it's lower than Intercom's Fin, which charges $0.99 per resolution. Help Scout also throws in a 3-month free trial of AI Answers, which is a nice way to test whether it actually deflects tickets before you commit.

Do the multiplication yourself before you enable it, because the honest math is not complicated but it is easy to skip: take your monthly conversation count, guess what share AI Answers would genuinely resolve end to end, and multiply by $0.75. That figure sits on top of your seat fees. The per-resolution model scales with your success, which sounds fair right up until a busy month arrives and the line item triples.

AI Answers also depends entirely on what you feed it. It reads your Docs knowledge base, so if those docs are thin or out of date, the answers will be thin or out of date too — and you still pay per resolution. If your knowledge base is thin or outdated, the bot gives thin or outdated answers, and you'll pay for resolutions that didn't really help anyone.

Where Help Scout's pricing hurts

Per-seat pricing is the biggest issue. Every person you add costs more, and support teams tend to grow during busy seasons.

The Plus tier locks the good AI features behind a $45 per user price tag, which is a steep jump over the entry plan — per person, every month. On a six-person team, that difference is real money by the end of a year.

And the Pro tier's 10-seat minimum shuts out smaller businesses entirely. We understand why Help Scout does it — Pro is built for larger operations — but it means growing teams hit a wall where the next tier up isn't available to them.

Live chat being absent from the free plan is another limitation worth flagging. If chat is core to how you sell, you're paying from day one.

Crisp: flat pricing that rewards bigger teams

Crisp takes a completely different approach. Instead of charging per person, it charges per workspace — €45 per workspace per month.

That means a 10-person team pays the same as a 2-person team. For support-heavy businesses with lots of agents, that math gets very attractive very fast.

Crisp bundles a shared inbox, chatbot, campaigns, video chat, and a knowledge base into that one price. There's also a free plan with 2 seats, though it comes with zero AI credits, so you can't test the AI features without upgrading.

The trade-off is AI depth. Crisp's AI features are lighter than what you'd get from Help Scout's Plus tier or a dedicated AI platform. If automated answers are your main goal, Crisp is the cheaper inbox, not the smarter bot.

Chatbase: when you just want a bot trained on your content

Chatbase solves a narrower problem. You upload your docs or point it at your website, and it builds a ChatGPT-style bot in minutes. Pricing starts at $40 per month, and there's a free plan with 50 message credits and 1 agent.

The embed works on any site, and mid-tier plans include API access and integrations. For a business that mainly needs a self-serve answer bot on a website, it's simple and fast.

The catch: no live chat on the cheaper tiers. The built-in Helpdesk with human handover requires the Standard plan at $150 per month. Chatbase also isn't built for e-commerce workflows, so order lookups and refunds aren't its strength.

Another detail worth knowing — free agents get deleted after 14 days of inactivity. If you're testing casually, don't expect your setup to stick around.

Which one should you pick?

If email is your main channel and you want a calm, easy-to-learn inbox, Help Scout is a strong fit. The free plan is real, the interface is the friendliest in this category, and AI Answers costs less per resolution than Intercom's equivalent.

If you have a larger team and per-seat pricing is killing you, Crisp's flat workspace fee is worth a serious look. Just go in knowing the AI is lighter.

If all you need is a bot trained on your own content, Chatbase gets you there fastest and cheapest.

And if you're not sure yet, start on a free plan. All three have one. Check the vendor's site for current pricing before you commit, since these numbers shift.