Crisp chat pricing in 2026: plans, seat caps and Hugo AI credits explained

Crisp's pricing page shows four numbers: $0, $45, $95 and $295 a month. The bill you actually pay depends on three things the page makes easy to skim past: how many people each plan lets you seat, how fast the AI credits drain, and which features start at which tier. This is a plan-by-plan explainer of Crisp chat pricing, with every figure checked against Crisp's own pages on October 21, 2026.

The headline result, so you can stop here if you're in a hurry: a team of five answering 1,000 AI-handled conversations a month lands on Crisp's Essentials plan and pays roughly $120 to $170. That is cheap, but it sits above the $95 on the plan card, and the plan card has cliffs in it.

Crisp chat pricing at a glance

Crisp bills per workspace, not per seat. You pick a plan, and the plan decides how many people can log in, how many customer profiles you can store and how many dollars of AI credit you get each month. Prices exclude VAT.

The Free plan is the permanent entry point: 2 seats and 100 profiles, but no email channel, no Hugo and no AI credits. Conversations are unlimited on every plan. Crisp is explicit that it doesn't bill on volume, and the Free plan is free "forever." All plans can be tried free for 14 days with every feature turned on. Full details are on Crisp's pricing page.

What each tier adds

Most of what people want from a support tool starts at Essentials, not Mini. Here is the part of Crisp's comparison table that decides which plan you need.

A few things that table doesn't say out loud. Mini gives you email and a handful of social channels, but no knowledge base, no analytics and no workflows, so a Mini team that wants a help center is really shopping for Essentials. And the omnichannel inbox that Crisp's marketing leans on (WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS) is an Essentials feature, not a Mini one.

The per-workspace math: what a seat really costs

The flat model is the reason Crisp looks cheap, and a stepped bill is the price of that. Here is the cost per person at different headcounts, taking the cheapest plan that fits.

Read down the last column. The fifth person costs $50 (the jump from Mini to Essentials). The eleventh person costs $200 (Essentials to Plus). Everything in between is free of marginal cost, which is the good part of the model.

Crisp publishes no per-seat price for going past ten on Essentials. Its limits article says some limits, including inbox operators, can be raised "when available for your plan or setup," so a custom limit may exist. If you're at eleven people and the only issue is the eleventh seat, it's worth asking before paying $200 more. That is our reading of the documentation, so confirm it with Crisp.

Hugo AI credits, decoded

Hugo is Crisp's AI agent. It's included from the Mini plan up, and instead of a per-resolution fee it draws down a monthly pool of dollar-denominated credits. The pool is $5 on Mini, $25 on Essentials and $75 on Plus. Free has none.

Crisp's pricing and billing article, updated September 20, 2026, gives the estimate that matters: a full Hugo-handled conversation costs "around $0.05 to $0.10 USD" on average. Crisp calls that an estimate. The real figure moves with message length, how much knowledge Hugo has to search, language, the model in use and the number of replies.

Notice what the plan cards imply. $5 for "around 90" conversations, $25 for "around 450" and $75 for "around 1,350" is about $0.055 per conversation every time. That's the cheap end of Crisp's own range. At the $0.10 end, the same credits cover roughly half as many conversations.

Here is how a month actually plays out.

1. 1Credits landThe plan adds $5, $25 or $75 of AI credit when your billing cycle resets, which Crisp says is currently the 4th of the month.
2. 2Each AI conversation draws someA conversation is billed from the first AI-handled message until it is resolved, routed or escalated. It's one conversation however many messages it holds.
3. 3Credits reach zeroWith pay-as-you-go off, which is the default, Hugo stops answering and new conversations go to your human operators.
4. 4Pay-as-you-go catches the overflowIf you turn it on, extra usage is billed against the limit you configure. Crisp doesn't publish the rate, so we assume it matches the included credit rate.
5. 5The month resetsCredits reset each cycle. Crisp's wording implies unused credit doesn't carry over.

Three details that catch people. First, Hugo bills on usage, not on whether the customer got helped, so conversations that end in an escalation still burn credits. Second, testing, training and the Playground draw from the same credits, which means a busy trial can eat the first month's pool. Third, workflows (including the deprecated MagicReply block) are not billed as Hugo usage, and "different models may have different usage costs," though Crisp doesn't publish per-model rates.

Touched versus resolved, in dollars

As a separate example from the scenario table below (the 5-person total there does not change), take a team with 1,000 conversations a month. The AI handles 450 of them: 300 end with the customer helped and 150 are handed to a human. A tool that bills per resolution charges for 300. Crisp charges for 450, because both groups used credits.

At $0.05 to $0.10 that is $22.50 to $45.00 of usage. On Essentials, the first $25 is covered, so the overage is $0 to $20 and the bill is $95 to $115. The extra 150 handoffs cost, at most, about $15. That's small, which is the honest point. The model is cheap enough that the difference barely matters at this volume. It matters more at 5,000 conversations, and it matters for forecasting, because a long, tangled conversation costs more than a short one.

What a 3, 5 and 10-person team pays

Three teams, monthly billing, the cheapest Crisp plan that fits. Each assumes every AI-handled conversation uses credits at Crisp's $0.05 to $0.10 estimate, and that extra usage is billed at the same rate, since the pay-as-you-go rate isn't published. Human-handled conversations aren't billed at all.

Variations worth knowing:

• The 3-person team on Essentials, because it wants a help center, analytics or WhatsApp: $95 plus $0 to $5 of overage, so $95 to $100.
• The 10-person team on Plus, for white label, summaries or an eleventh seat: $295 plus ($150 to $300 minus $75), so $370 to $520.
• Yearly billing: Crisp lets you switch it on in the app but doesn't publish a yearly price or discount, so these totals don't change.
• This assumes you stay under the profile caps. More than 5,000 contacts on Mini, or 50,000 on Essentials, breaks the table.

Limits that quietly force an upgrade

Seat caps get the attention. These get the surprises.

Customer profiles are capped at 5,000 on Mini, 50,000 on Essentials and 200,000 on Plus. A reviewer on Capterra describes the cost as climbing once you need more than 5,000 profiles.

Channel accounts are capped too. Crisp's FAQ says one and only one of each of Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp Business, Viber, Line and Telegram, email excepted, can be centralized in a workspace, with more available "by subscribing to higher limits." The price of those limits isn't published. An agency or a company with two WhatsApp numbers hits this on day one.

Sub-inboxes are fixed at two on Essentials and can only be raised on Plus. Custom limits in general need Essentials or above, and their prices aren't published either.

Trials, yearly billing and discounts

Crisp's discount rules are scattered across several help articles. Here they are in one place.

Canceling means downgrading to Free. Crisp's help center doesn't say whether a downgrade takes effect immediately or at period end, and it doesn't describe proration, so ask before you downgrade mid-cycle. A temporary suspension of up to one month can be requested. VAT is added on top, though EU businesses can remove it with a VAT number and non-EU customers aren't charged VAT.

Where Crisp's price buys you more, and where it doesn't

Crisp's price buys a lot of channels. WhatsApp Business, Instagram, SMS, Viber, Line, Telegram and phone all sit in one inbox on Essentials, which few tools at $95 match. It buys EU hosting and a DPA, two-factor authentication on every plan, and more than 100 integrations on Plus.

It doesn't buy a compliance paper trail. Crisp's own help article says it hasn't been through a SOC 2 audit, and we found no SSO/SAML or HIPAA support listed on any tier. If a customer's security questionnaire needs those, no Crisp plan clears it.

Crisp next to the alternatives, and where Talvo fits

Here's the same set of teams on other tools, using the same rule as above: every AI-handled conversation counted as billable, list prices, monthly billing. For tools that bill per resolution (Help Scout, Zendesk, Talvo) that's a ceiling.

*Tidio doesn't sell 3,000 Lyro conversations self-serve; this assumes the $0.70 rate holds. Per-tool arithmetic is in our Crisp alternatives post.

Crisp is the cheapest in every row. That's the honest answer, and no spin on the AI line changes it.

Talvo is our product, so weigh this section accordingly. It's priced per workspace like Crisp: Starter is $49 a month for 5 teammates and 100 AI resolutions, Growth $149 for 15 and 500, Scale $299 for 25 and 2,000, with $0.49 per extra resolution. It has its own cliff, the sixth teammate, which forces the Growth plan. Talvo bills only conversations the AI answered end to end from your published articles with no teammate message, and a handoff is never billed. In the 5-person example, if 300 of the 1,000 AI-handled chats end in a handoff, Talvo counts 700 and the Growth plan comes to $149 plus 200 extra resolutions at $0.49, or $247.

The one place Talvo is cheaper than Crisp is five teammates with light AI use: Starter at $49 versus Crisp's Essentials plan at $95, until AI volume passes about 195 resolutions a month. It also lacks things Crisp has: WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram and phone channels, EU hosting, and mobile apps (Talvo works in the phone's browser). Talvo is new and in beta, has no review-site ratings, and, like Crisp, has no SOC 2 report. For the full feature comparison, see Talvo vs Crisp, and for how flat plans and seats interact generally, per-seat vs flat pricing.

Whatever tool you use, it helps to see engaged, resolved and handed-off counts side by side. With usage billing that funnel is how you learn what a "good" month looks like. Talvo's version of that view is on the Scale plan.

What to do with these numbers

Crisp compared with Intercom is a separate argument, and Crisp vs Intercom prices it for three team sizes. If AI billing is what you're sorting out across vendors, AI resolution pricing compared lines up every definition. And if you only need a rough number for your own team, the free support cost calculator will give you one.