Front Pricing in 2026: One Channel on Starter and the AI Meter
Shayan, Founder9 min read
Front, the shared inbox that grew into a customer operations platform, costs $25 to $105 per seat per month on annual billing, or $35 to $85 monthly, with the top plan annual-only. There is no free plan. Starter at $25 is one channel type, email or chat or SMS, not two. A team that wants email and live chat together starts on Professional at $65. The AI agent, Autopilot, bills $0.89 for every conversation it resolves without a person, and smaller amounts when it only triages or hands off. A two-person team handling 500 conversations a month pays $70 on Starter with email alone, $170 on Professional with email and chat, and about $304 once Autopilot resolves 30% of them.
Front's seats sit above Help Scout's and Zendesk's and its AI meter sits between them. What sets Front apart is the Starter rule: the cheap plan cannot run two channels, so the price most SaaS teams will pay starts at $65.
The three plans
Front prices by full seat. Guests are free: they can read conversations they are invited to and comment, but never reply to a customer.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Seats | Channels | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $35 per seat | $25 per seat | Up to 10 | One type, 10 channels | Shared inbox, one help center, 10 rules, basic analytics |
| Professional | $85 per seat | $65 per seat | Up to 50 | Any type, 30 channels | Email and chat together, two help centers, 20 rules, macros, CSAT, time goals, SSO, branding removal |
| Enterprise | Annual only | $105 per seat | No cap | 50 channels | Unlimited rules, 50 help centers, custom dashboards, Copilot and QA included, multilingual help |
Starter's channel rule is the whole plan. Email alone, chat alone or SMS alone is fine; the pricing FAQ names those three, and the plan table also lists Slack, which the FAQ does not. Add a second type and you are on Professional, which also caps at 50 seats. Custom domains for the help center, removing Front's branding and SAML single sign-on all start on Professional, so Starter's help center carries Front's name on Front's domain.
The trial is 14 days of Professional with no card, limited to 15 people and 5,000 messages, with sequences and forwarding rules locked.
What else lands on the bill
Autopilot, $0.05 to $0.89 per conversation. Front bills its AI by what it did. Triage, meaning routing, tagging or summarising, is $0.05. A handoff, where Autopilot drafted or replied and a person took over, is $0.39. A resolution, where no human replied, is $0.89, and qualifies after 24 hours of silence on chat and SMS or 72 hours on email. Only the highest outcome is charged per conversation. There is no included allowance on any plan, no documented customer-set spend cap, and volume discounts require a prepaid commitment. The trial is 30 days and up to 1,000 resolutions.
Copilot, $20 per seat. The assistant for your agents, bought per seat on Starter and Professional and included on Enterprise. The old free suggested-replies feature was withdrawn for new customers in October 2026; Front's help article says to build an agent instead.
WhatsApp. Professional and up, at Meta's rates plus a 20% administration fee.
API capacity. Plans include 50, 100 or 200 requests a minute. Each extra 100 a minute is $200 a month.
Onboarding. Mandatory on contracts above $25,000 a year: $10,000 for 25 hours. Above $75,000 it is $23,000 for 60 hours.
Seats bill in advance and Autopilot monthly in arrears.
Three bills
Monthly billing, every person a full seat, no Copilot, no WhatsApp. The first column is Starter with email as the one channel. The second is Professional with email and chat. The third adds Autopilot resolving 30% of conversations at $0.89, with no triage or handoff charges on the rest.
| Team | Starter, email only | Professional, email and chat | Professional with Autopilot at 30% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 agents, 500 conversations | $70 | $170 | $304 |
| 5 agents, 2,000 conversations | $175 | $425 | $959 |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations | $350 | $850 | $2,185 |
On annual billing the Starter rows are $50, $125 and $250, and the Professional rows $130, $325 and $650.
The third column is a floor. If Autopilot drafts a reply on every conversation a person finishes, each of those is a $0.39 handoff: another $137, $546 and $1,365 a month on the three teams. At ten agents, AI can be two thirds of the bill before anyone upgrades a seat.
Against the others: Professional's $85 monthly seat is almost three times Help Scout's Standard and more than twice Intercom's Essential, both of which include chat and email on their cheapest tier. Autopilot's $0.89 resolution sits between Help Scout's $0.75 and Intercom's $0.99. Front is the expensive seat with a middling meter.
All seven help desks on this site are on one table, with the same three teams costed on each, in help desk pricing compared.
Live chat, email and an AI agent, one flat price.
UserJot's support inbox and Juno come with every plan. No agent seats, no per-resolution fee.
Front for startups
In early 2025 Front's pricing page offered qualifying startups six months free and mentioned nonprofit discounts. The current page says nothing about either, and there is no published education or open-source program. If you are small and early, ask; do not budget on it.
What changed in 2025
Until mid-2024 Front sold Growth, Scale and Premier at $59, $99 and $229 a seat on annual billing, with Premier requiring 50 seats. A $19 Starter arrived in June 2024, and the first AI price, AI Answers at $0.70 per resolution, with it. In August 2025 the whole lineup was replaced by Starter, Professional and Enterprise at $25, $65 and $105: the cheap seat went up by a third, and quality and CSAT scoring became $20 and $10 add-ons that have since folded into Enterprise. Autopilot replaced AI Answers in November 2025 at $0.89, and the three-outcome pricing with the $0.05 floor appeared in June 2026. WhatsApp moved from a flat $70 per 1,000 conversations to Meta's rates plus 20%.
Front's seat prices are not published with a history, and no grandfathering terms were announced. A Capterra reviewer in August 2025 listed a price increase next to the interface change as reasons to look elsewhere. If you are on a legacy plan, the renewal letter is where you find out.
Fine print that bites
- The SaaS agreement, effective September 2026, renews annual contracts for a further 12 months unless Front has 30 days' notice. The billing help says monthly plans cancel self-serve at the end of the period. Both are true; the order form decides which applies to you.
- Prepaid fees are non-refundable and seats cannot be reduced mid-term. Deleting or blocking a user does not refund their licence; reductions take effect at renewal.
- At a plan's channel limit, Front blocks new channels until you remove one or upgrade. There is no per-channel overage to buy.
- After cancellation you have 30 days of read-only access: sending, comments, the knowledge base and the API are switched off. Then deletion under the retention policy.
- Office 365 sync is one-way for state: sent and received messages sync, but read, archive, folder and snooze changes do not. One Capterra reviewer in February 2026 put it as "The Outlook integration is no longer a true two-way sync."
Is Front worth it?
For an operations-heavy company, logistics, financial services, travel, where several departments share customer email and the inbox is the system of record, yes. The product's strengths are the ones reviewers name on G2, where it holds 4.6 across 2,500 reviews: shared visibility, an interface that feels like email, rules that route and assign, and a long integration list. Front says 9,300 businesses use it and passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025. It is a serious company with a serious product.
The complaints are about money. Per-user cost as a team grows is the most repeated negative on Capterra, a three-person startup on Reddit in 2024 said adding a chatbot would take them from $87 to $300 a month, and a sysadmin thread with a company spending about $30,000 a year on Front ended with "After trying Front, Spark and Hiver, we ended up on Missive." Email threading and notification noise come up too.
For a SaaS team whose support is email and in-app chat, Front's design works against you. Support email and in-app chat are two channel types, so Starter is off the table and you are at $65 to $85 a seat on day one, with the AI billed on top.
The same three teams on UserJot
UserJot runs your public feedback board, roadmap and changelog, and the same product carries your support. Live chat on your site and support email land in one inbox. Juno, our AI agent, answers from your docs and the sites you point her at, searches the feedback board before she replies, writes in the customer's language, and hands the thread to a person the moment a question needs one. A feature request that arrives in a support chat gets filed, voted on and announced from the same place, and the customer who asked hears about it when it ships. Everyone on the team can work the inbox, because there are no agent seats.
The price is flat: $0, $29 or $59 a month for the whole workspace, with no meter on resolutions. Chat and email are both in the inbox on every plan, which on Front is the step from Starter to Professional.
| Team | Front Professional, with Autopilot at 30% | UserJot |
|---|---|---|
| 2 agents, 500 conversations | $304 | $0 |
| 5 agents, 2,000 conversations | $959 | $29 |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations | $2,185 | $29 |
Free covers three teammates. Starter at $29 covers up to 100, which is every other team on this page, and adds a custom domain, private boards, guest posting and the API. Pro at $59 adds single sign-on, identity masking and white-labelling. None of the tiers charge for conversations or for Juno.
Front's edge is the shared inbox as an operations tool: departments working one mailbox, rules that route and assign, Slack Connect, SLAs and a CRM underneath. Logistics, finance and travel companies whose inbox is the system of record should pay for it. UserJot has no departments, no SLA policies and no app marketplace. It is for the SaaS team whose two channels are a chat widget and a support address, which on Front is the line between Starter and Professional, and which on UserJot is one inbox on every plan.
Questions people ask
How much does Front cost?
$25 per seat per month for Starter on annual billing, $65 for Professional and $105 for Enterprise, which is annual-only. Monthly billing is $35 and $85. Autopilot is $0.89 per resolved conversation on top.
Does Front have a free plan?
No. There is a 14-day Professional trial with no card, capped at 15 people and 5,000 messages. The cheapest ongoing option is one Starter seat at $25 a month on annual billing.
Can I use email and chat on Starter?
No. Starter allows one channel type: email, Front Chat or SMS. Running two types requires Professional at $65 a seat on annual billing.
How is Autopilot billed?
Per conversation, by outcome: $0.05 if it only triaged, $0.39 if it drafted or replied and a person took over, $0.89 if it resolved the conversation with no human reply. Only the highest outcome is charged. A resolution qualifies after 24 hours of silence on chat and SMS, 72 hours on email.
Does Front have a startup discount?
Not a published one. A six-month free offer for startups appeared on the pricing page in early 2025 and is gone from the current page. Ask sales.
How do I cancel Front?
Monthly plans cancel from Settings under Billing, taking effect at the end of the period. Annual contracts need 30 days' written notice before the renewal date or they renew for another year. You keep read-only access for 30 days after cancellation.
What happens to my data if I cancel?
Thirty days of read-only access with sending, the knowledge base and the API disabled, then deletion. Full exports go through support as CSV per inbox; the knowledge base is exported separately on request.
