Help Scout Pricing in 2026: Per User Again, Plus $0.75 an AI Answer
Shayan, Founder9 min read
Help Scout, the shared-inbox help desk for small support teams, costs $25 to $75 per user per month on annual billing, or $30 to $90 if you pay monthly. There is a free plan for up to five users and 100 helped contacts a month. Its AI agent, AI Answers, adds $0.75 for every conversation it resolves, after three free months. A two-person team handling 500 conversations a month pays $60 on the Standard plan, or about $173 once AI Answers is doing 30% of the work.
Help Scout spent most of 2025 billing by contacts instead of users, raised prices in the middle of it, and then went back to per-user pricing. If you looked at it last year, the numbers you remember are wrong.
The four plans
Help Scout prices by full user. A full user is anyone who replies to customers, and the account owner counts as one.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Users | Inboxes | Docs sites | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Up to 5 | 1 | 1 | 100 helped contacts a month, 10 articles, 1 Beacon, 1 integration |
| Standard | $30 per user | $25 per user | Up to 25 | 2 | 2 | Unlimited contacts and articles, 150 workflows, 1 SLA |
| Plus | $54 per user | $45 per user | Up to 50 | 5 | 3 | 5 light users, 500 advanced workflows, AI Drafts, 2 SLA policies |
| Pro | $90 per user | $75 per user | 10 minimum | 10 | 5 | 15 light users, unlimited workflows and SLAs, SSO and HIPAA included |
Three things in this table decide what you pay. Standard caps out at 25 users and Plus at 50, so growth forces a plan change, not just another seat. Pro has a ten-user minimum and a "book a demo" button, so the cheapest Pro bill is $750 a month. And the free plan is a real plan, not a trial: it stops replies at 100 helped contacts in a month and resumes next month, which is workable for a product with a small user base and useless for one with a large one.
Light users are people who can read conversations and leave notes but never reply. Plus includes five and Pro fifteen; beyond that they are $10 each a month on annual billing. Extra inboxes are $10 a month and extra Docs sites $20.
What else lands on the bill
AI Answers, $0.75 per resolution. This is the autonomous agent that replies to customers from your Docs. A resolution is an answer the customer does not follow up on. Greetings, clarifying questions and anything that ends in a human taking over are not billed. New accounts get three months with no resolution charges; existing accounts that switch it on do not. Owners can set a monthly spend limit, and when it is hit AI Answers stops and Beacon falls back to whatever you configured.
AI Drafts. Suggested replies for your agents. Included on Plus and Pro, not sold on Standard.
Messages. Proactive in-app messages count unique viewers, not messages sent. 2,000 viewers a month are included on paid plans; the next 2,000 are $20, and the ladder runs to $620 at 150,000. Not available on Free.
Everything else is per unit. Extra light users, inboxes and Docs sites at the prices above. SAML SSO, IP restrictions and HIPAA are add-ons on Standard and Plus with no public price, and included on Pro. Phone support goes through Aircall and SMS through Twilio, both billed by those vendors.
Help Scout does not meter ordinary conversations or contacts on paid plans. The things that move the bill are users, AI resolutions and the plan ceilings.
Three bills
Monthly billing, every agent on a full Standard seat, no light users, no extra inboxes, no startup discount. "With AI Answers" means it resolves 30% of conversations after the free three months.
| Team | Humans only | With AI Answers at 30% |
|---|---|---|
| 2 agents, 500 conversations | $60 | $173 |
| 5 agents, 2,000 conversations | $150 | $600 |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations | $300 | $1,425 |
On annual billing the human-only rows are $50, $125 and $250.
The two-agent team can run on Free for $0 if its 500 conversations come from no more than 100 distinct people in a month, which is true for some B2B products and false for most consumer ones. Nobody is on Free with ten agents.
The shape is the same as Intercom's, at lower rates. Seats are flat and predictable. The AI meter scales with how many customers write in, and at ten agents it is almost four times the seat cost. Help Scout's resolution price is $0.75 against Intercom's $0.99, and the seats are about a quarter cheaper, so the whole bill lands at roughly three quarters of Intercom's for the same team.
Live chat, email and an AI agent, one flat price.
UserJot's support inbox and Juno come with every plan. No per-user seats, no per-resolution fee.
Help Scout for Startups
New customers that are incorporated technology startups under two years old with under $1 million in annual revenue get six months free, on Plus, with AI Answers included. After six months you pay list price for whatever you are using. It is simpler than Intercom's three-year step-down and shorter: half a year, then full price.
Nonprofits and certified B Corps get 10% off for life, stacking with the annual discount, and some organisations working on human rights, sustainability or representation in tech get up to 100%.
Fine print that bites
- The first payment, monthly or annual, has a 30-day money-back guarantee. After that there are no refunds for partial months, unused months or the rest of an annual term.
- An annual payment is a credit balance, not twelve fixed months. Add users or run up AI resolutions and the credit runs out early, at which point you are billed again.
- The 2026 terms require 30 days' written notice not to renew, or the subscription renews for the same term and quantity.
- Only the account owner can cancel, and access ends the moment they do. Data is permanently deleted 60 days later, and the terms promise a restoration only within 14 days. Export first.
- Help Scout can remove your plan or require an upgrade with 60 days' notice. It did this to everyone in 2025.
What happened in 2025
In early 2024 Standard was $20 a user on annual billing. In November 2024 Help Scout dropped per-user pricing altogether: unlimited users, billed by "helped contacts", with Standard at $50 for 100 contacts a month. Teams with many agents and few customers got a bargain. Teams with a large user base and two support people watched their bill multiply, and by April 2025 the Reddit thread titled "HelpScout is significantly raising its prices out of nowhere" was collecting people moving to Crisp and to the self-hosted FreeScout.
By December 2025 the per-user model was back, at $25, $45 and $75 on annual billing, higher than before the experiment, with the new $0.75 AI meter alongside it. The current page is that model. The lesson for anyone choosing it now is that the vendor has changed its billing unit twice in two years, and the terms let it do so again on 60 days' notice.
Is Help Scout worth it?
For a support team of three to twenty-five people answering email and chat from a shared inbox, with a help center and nothing more exotic than Slack and a CRM, yes. It is the best-liked product in its class for a reason: the inbox is quick, the setup takes an afternoon, and nobody on the team needs training. The reviews that turn negative are about cost growth as seats are added and about the 2025 billing change, not about the product.
For a two-to-five person SaaS team, the question is the same one Intercom raises. You will pay per seat and per AI answer, and both go up as the company grows. The per-user model also means the product manager who wants to read support conversations is either a $25 seat or a $10 light user who cannot reply.
The same three teams on UserJot
UserJot is built for that team. 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 your feedback board before she replies, writes in the customer's language, and hands the thread to a person the moment a question needs one. Everyone on the team can work the inbox, because there are no seats.
The price is flat: $0, $29 or $59 a month for the whole workspace, with no meter on resolutions. A support tool should not earn more when your customers need more help.
| Team | Help Scout, with AI at 30% | UserJot |
|---|---|---|
| 2 agents, 500 conversations | $173 | $0 |
| 5 agents, 2,000 conversations | $600 | $29 |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations | $1,425 | $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.
The inbox is one part of a product that also runs your public feedback board, roadmap and changelog. 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. Help Scout's edge is a deeper help desk: SLAs, workflows and a longer list of integrations. For a SaaS team whose support happens in the app and over email, UserJot does the job at a price that stays put.
Questions people ask
How much does Help Scout cost?
$25 to $75 per user per month on annual billing, $30 to $90 monthly, plus $0.75 per conversation AI Answers resolves. A five-person team on Standard pays $150 a month, or about $600 with AI Answers handling 30% of conversations.
Is Help Scout free?
Yes, for up to five users and 100 helped contacts a month, with one inbox, one Docs site and ten articles. When you reach 100 contacts in a month, replies pause until the next month or an upgrade. Standard and Plus also have a 15-day trial with no card.
What counts as a user? Am I paying for my customers?
No. A user is a member of your team who replies to customers. Customers, contacts and conversations are not billed on paid plans. Light users, who can read and leave notes but not reply, are $10 a month beyond the ones your plan includes.
What counts as an AI resolution?
An answer from AI Answers that the customer does not follow up on. If the customer asks for more help or a person takes over, there is no charge. Multiple answers in one session are billed once.
Can I cap AI spending?
Yes. Owners and admins set a monthly resolution limit. When it is hit, AI Answers switches off until the next cycle and Beacon reverts to its fallback mode.
Does Help Scout have a startup discount?
Yes. Help Scout for Startups gives new customers six months free on Plus with AI Answers, if the company is a tech startup under two years old with under $1 million in revenue.
Can I get a refund?
On the first payment, within 30 days. After that, no: unused months and the balance of an annual term are not refunded.
