How Much Does Help Scout Cost? A 2026 Pricing Breakdown
Help Scout is one of the few big support tools that still has a free plan, and it charges less for AI than Intercom or Zendesk. That makes it the easy pick on price for a small team. It also makes the question "what will it cost once we grow" harder to answer from the pricing page, because the headline per-user number is only part of the bill. Here is how Help Scout prices in 2026, from the free plan up.
The free plan, and what it leaves out
Help Scout's free plan is not a trial. It covers 5 users, 1 inbox, and 1 Docs site (their knowledge base), with 100 contacts a month. For a two or three person team handling a trickle of email, that can be enough on its own.
The limits are where it ends. One inbox means one shared email address. One hundred monthly contacts is a low ceiling for anything with steady traffic. And a single Docs site is fine until you need a second knowledge base. When any of those binds, you are on a paid plan, and paid plans are per user.
The paid plans: Standard, Plus, Pro
The three paid tiers are priced per user, per month. Help Scout publishes them monthly, with about 16% off if you pay annually:
| Plan | Per user / mo (monthly billing) | Headline inclusions |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $25 | 2 inboxes, unlimited contacts, up to 25 users, live chat and social channels |
| Plus | $45 | 5 inboxes, up to 50 users, advanced workflows and SLAs, light users |
| Pro | $75 | 10 inboxes, unlimited users (10 minimum), onboarding, SSO/SAML, HIPAA |
Unlimited contacts on every paid plan is the thing to notice, because it is where Help Scout is cheaper than tools that charge by contact volume. You pay for seats, not for the size of your audience.
Two details change the number. Pro has a ten-user minimum, so the entry price for Pro is ten seats whether or not you have ten people. And Plus and Pro count "light users" separately from full seats. A light user can view conversations and collaborate without taking up a full seat. Plus includes 5 and Pro includes 15, with room for up to 25 and 50 respectively. That suits engineers or managers who need visibility into support.
AI Answers: $0.75 per resolution, cleanly defined
Help Scout's customer-facing AI is called AI Answers, and it is a metered add-on on top of your seats. It costs $0.75 per resolution, available on all three paid plans, which is below both Intercom's and Zendesk's published per-resolution rates.
What makes it worth a close read is the definition, which Help Scout spells out on the pricing page: a resolution is "a single conversation that is resolved by AI Answers without human assistance," counted "only if the customer receives an AI response and doesn't use escalation, search the knowledge base, ask more questions, or indicate that they need more help." In plain terms, if one of your people steps in, it does not bill. A conversation the customer escalates does not bill. That is a narrow, buyer-friendly meter, and Help Scout states it plainly. Intercom, by comparison, prices its Fin agent from $0.99 per outcome and counts some conversations that reach a human. We set the two definitions side by side in Intercom vs Help Scout.
New accounts get three months of unlimited AI Answers before the per-resolution meter starts, so you can see your resolution volume before you pay for it. After that, you can set a monthly spending cap, and AI Answers switches off for the rest of the month if you hit it.
One thing not to confuse with AI Answers: Help Scout's agent-facing AI tools. AI Assist, which expands, shortens, edits or translates a reply, is included on every paid plan. AI Drafts and AI Summarize are included on Plus and Pro, not Standard. These help your staff write and catch up on conversations, and they do not bill per conversation. Only AI Answers, which replies to your customers directly, is metered. Comparing a customer-facing rate against an agent-facing freebie produces a number that means nothing, so keep the two apart.
The costs that are not in the per-user headline
"$25 a user" is a floor. A few lines move it:
- Extra inboxes. Standard includes 2, Plus 5, Pro 10. Beyond that, each additional inbox is $10 a month on annual billing ($12 monthly). A team that splits support, sales and billing into separate addresses can pass the included count quickly.
- Extra Docs sites. Standard includes 2 knowledge bases, Plus 3, Pro 5. Each additional Docs site is $20 a month on annual billing ($24 monthly).
- AI Answers, the per-resolution meter above, once the three free months end.
- The per-user scaling itself. Every seat you add pays the full rate again, the same as with Intercom or Zendesk.
None of these is hidden. They are on the pricing page. But they are the difference between the headline and the invoice, and they are the lines to total before you commit.
What a five-person team pays
Five users, Standard, monthly billing:
- Seats: 5 × $25 = $125/mo, which includes 2 inboxes and unlimited contacts
- AI Assist for editing and translating replies: included
- Running total: $125/mo, before AI Answers and before any extra inboxes
Add customer-facing AI once the free three months end. If AI Answers resolves 200 conversations a month without a human stepping in, that is 200 × $0.75 = $150/mo on top, for a total around $275/mo. It bills only the conversations AI closes on its own, so this line is usually well below your total ticket count.
On Plus, the same five seats are 5 × $45 = $225/mo for the workflow, SLA and light-user features, plus AI Drafts and AI Summarize. Pro is not five-seat math at all: its ten-user minimum means the floor is 10 × $75 = $750/mo even for a smaller team, which is why Pro is aimed at teams that have grown into it.
Is it worth it?
For a small team whose support is mostly email, Help Scout is easy to budget for and clear about how its AI bills. The free plan covers five users, the entry seat price with live chat sits below Intercom's and Zendesk's, unlimited contacts keeps the bill tied to your team size rather than your traffic, and the AI meter only charges for conversations it closes without help. If that describes you, it is a strong pick on price.
The budgeting caveats are the ordinary ones for per-seat software. The bill scales with every person you add, extra inboxes and Docs sites cost on top, Pro's ten-seat minimum is a step rather than a slope, and AI Answers is a separate meter once the free trial ends. If you are weighing Help Scout against the other names, we compared it with Intercom in Intercom vs Help Scout, and if you want something lighter, we keep a list of alternatives to Help Scout for smaller teams.
One of those alternatives is Pavior, which we build. It is priced per plan rather than per user: $0, $25 and $99 a month. The free tier gives a two-person team every feature, including live chat, CRM, help center, session replay and campaigns. AI is not metered by the conversation either: there is no per-resolution line on a Pavior invoice. Worth being straight about, since we sell against Help Scout: their free plan covers five users, which is more generous than our two. And economy covers four seats at $25, so a fifth person moves you to the $99 plan, which covers ten. That is a cliff, and it sits in our pricing the same way the per-user steps and the ten-seat Pro minimum sit in Help Scout's.
For the wider field, our roundup of the best customer support software for small SaaS teams covers the rest.
Sources
- Help Scout: Pricing