Help Scout pricing in 2026: every plan, the $0.75 AI resolution, and what 3, 5 and 10 people pay

A five-person team on Help Scout's Standard plan pays $125 a month on annual billing before anyone switches on the AI. Let the AI resolve 300 conversations and the same team pays $350. That gap is the whole story of Help Scout pricing in 2026: seats are cheap and predictable, and the AI is a second meter, $0.75 per resolution, that you have to budget on its own.

This guide covers every plan, the user caps that force upgrades, how the AI is counted and capped, what annual billing really commits you to, and what 3, 5 and 10 people pay. Help Scout's numbers come from its own pricing page and help docs, and competitor figures from their pricing pages, all checked on October 21, 2026, in US dollars before tax.

We make Talvo, which competes with Help Scout for chat-first teams. It gets one section near the end and no verdict.

Help Scout pricing at a glance, checked October 21, 2026

Help Scout charges per user, per month. Every user counts, including the account owner. Annual billing is cheaper; the pricing toggle says 16%, and the per-user numbers work out to 16.7% ($25 against $30, $45 against $54, $75 against $90).

Source: Help Scout pricing.

The Free plan is real but narrow. It covers 5 users, one inbox, one Docs site with 10 articles, 10 saved replies and tags, and 30 days of reports. The catch is 100 contacts a month. Past that, you can't reply to customers until the next cycle or until you upgrade, though incoming email still arrives. There's also a "Sent with Help Scout" footer, and live chat isn't included (Free gets the Beacon contact form only).

Trials: 15 days of Standard or Plus with no card. A Pro trial goes through sales.

Per user, not per contact (and why older guides disagree)

Some pricing guides still describe Help Scout as priced by "contacts helped." That isn't what the current pricing page shows. Today it's a per-user model with caps: 25 users on Standard, 50 on Plus, and Pro with a 10-user minimum. A secondary review says the company tried contact-based pricing and went back to per-user, without dating the change, so if you see a page quoting a different structure, check its date before trusting its numbers.

The one place Help Scout does meter volume is the free plan's 100 contacts a month, and the AI, covered below.

What each plan adds

Seat price is the headline, but the plans differ in ways that decide whether Standard is enough.

Plus also adds integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira and Linear.

One wrinkle in the vendor's own page: the Standard plan card says "Live chat and SMS," while the comparison table says SMS on Standard comes via an integration. If SMS matters to you, ask before buying.

AI Answers, Envoy, Scout: the $0.75 resolution

Help Scout's AI agent goes by three names. The pricing page sells it as Envoy, the FAQ calls the feature AI Answers, and the billing docs call the agent Scout. They're the same product: a chat agent that answers from your Docs inside the Beacon widget.

The price is $0.75 per resolution (Help Scout's AI resolutions doc), billed monthly. Help Scout says prepaid discounts exist but doesn't publish the rates.

What counts as a resolution

The definition is narrow, and it favors the buyer. A resolution is one AI chat session that ends without a human. You're charged only if Scout gave a response and the customer didn't ask for more help afterward. It's one charge per session. You aren't charged when Scout only greets or asks a follow-up question, when the customer escalates to a person, when they keep searching the knowledge base, or when they click "I still need help."

Compare that with a broad definition, where silence counts as success. Here, a customer who pushes for more help voids the charge.

The meter bills later than everything else

Seats are billed in advance. Resolutions are billed in arrears. On annual plans the resolution charges are deducted from your prepaid annual credit, which Help Scout says means the credit gets used up faster than a year. More on that in the annual billing section.

The spending cap

You can set a monthly limit, measured in resolutions. When you hit it, Scout is turned off in your Beacon until the next cycle, and the widget falls back to self-service or a neutral mode. Raising the cap takes effect within an hour; lowering it below current usage waits for the next cycle. The cap makes your worst-case AI bill knowable: cap times $0.75. It also means a busy month can end with the AI off for the rest of the cycle.

What's included at no extra cost

AI Assist (editing and translating replies) comes with Standard and up. AI Drafts and AI Summarize come with Plus and up. Help Scout's pages mention Copilot as "coming soon" and a product called Signal for insights; neither shows a price, so we can't say whether they'll cost extra.

On the Free plan, Scout resolutions count toward the 100-contact monthly limit.

The three free months, and the month-four cliff

New accounts get three months of unlimited AI resolutions at no charge, starting at account creation. Existing Help Scout customers get no AI trial. The three months start at account creation, so any days you spend setting up before going live come out of them.

That makes the first quarter unrepresentative. Take the 5-person Standard team on annual billing with 300 resolutions a month:

• Months 1 to 3: $125 a month, seats only.
• Month 4 onward: $125 plus 300 × $0.75 ($225) = $350 a month.
• First twelve months: 3 × $125 + 9 × $350 = $3,525, against $4,200 if the AI had been billed from day one.

The $675 saved is real, and it's also a reason not to size your budget from your first invoices. Plan for month four.

What 3, 5 and 10 people pay

To compare like with like, we used three teams. Team A is 3 people with 300 conversations a month that the AI touches. Team B is 5 people with 1,000. Team C is 10 people with 3,000. We assumed the AI fully resolves 60% of those, so 180, 600 and 1,800 billable resolutions. That 60% is our assumption, not Help Scout data; Help Scout's own calculator cites a 73% average, and under its strict definition the billed count may come in lower than what you'd call resolved. We priced Standard, the cheapest plan with live chat. We left out add-ons, tax and the free trial months.

Two patterns. First, the AI dwarfs the seats quickly. One Standard seat costs $25 on annual billing, which is the price of 33 resolutions. Team A's AI averages 60 resolutions per person, so it's already 64% of the bill. By Team C it's 84%.

Second, if the AI resolves everything it touches, the AI line grows by two thirds: $225, $750 and $2,250, which makes Standard annual $300, $875 and $2,500.

Pro doesn't fit any of these teams as priced. It requires a minimum of 10 users, so even a 3-person team would pay $750 a month on annual billing ($900 monthly) for seats alone.

The 5-person headline

For the team most readers ask about, 5 people and 300 resolutions a month, the bills are:

The calculator above compares this team across five products at list prices. Change the numbers to your own.

Annual billing is a credit, and it's hard to walk back

Help Scout's docs (About annual payments) describe an annual payment as a credit that's drawn down each month. Adding users drains it faster. AI resolutions and Messages overages draw from it too. For our 5-person Standard team, the annual prepayment is 5 × $25 × 12 = $1,500. If AI charges come out of that same credit at $225 a month, it drains at $350 a month and a $1,500 credit lasts about four months, not twelve. That's our arithmetic on the docs' description, not a billing statement, and the docs don't say what happens when the credit runs out early. Ask.

Mid-term changes are where the vendor's own documents disagree.

The other mechanics worth knowing:

• Users you add mid-cycle are charged pro rata at your next billing, based on the days left. Users added and deleted within 24 hours aren't charged.
• Annual card payments auto-renew by default. The docs say you can switch auto-renew off to return to monthly; the Terms ask for 30 days' notice of non-renewal.
• Wire or ACH is available for annual prepayments over $2,500.
• There's a 30-day money-back guarantee from the first payment, on monthly and annual plans.

Add-ons and caps that move the bill

Light users are free up to a plan allowance. Help Scout's pages give two different counts for how many Pro includes, so check that number if light users matter to you. Beacon Messages viewers above the included amount also carry a usage charge; check the current rate on Help Scout's pricing page.

The Docs sites are where Help Scout is genuinely generous: two on Standard, three on Plus, five on Pro, which suits teams running help centers for several brands.

The cap that bites is users. At 25 people on Standard you pay 25 × $25 = $625 a month on annual billing. Hire the 26th and you must move to Plus: 26 × $45 = $1,170, an extra $545 a month for one more person. Monthly billing is worse, $750 to $1,404. That's the stepped shape of Help Scout's tiers, and it's why larger teams model Plus from the start.

Discounts, the nonprofit rate and the free plan

Nonprofit organizations get 10% off, and it can be combined with the annual discount. A separate program called Help Scout for Good offers up to 100% off to organizations focused on human rights, environmental sustainability or underrepresentation in tech; the pricing FAQ also mentions B Corps. The FAQ refers to a startup plan for early-stage companies but doesn't publish its terms, so ask sales rather than assume.

Estimate your own bill in five steps

The sample teams above are only a guide. Your inputs matter more.

1. 1Count the usersEveryone who replies to customers, including the account owner. Light users are counted separately and are free up to the plan's allowance.
2. 2Pick the planStandard unless you need round robin, advanced workflows, teams or the customer portal (Plus), or HIPAA and SSO included (Pro, minimum 10 users).
3. 3Count chats the AI could handleLook at last month's live chat sessions and mark the routine ones your Docs already answer.
4. 4Apply a rate you can defendHelp Scout's calculator cites 73%. We used 60% above. Start low, because the strict definition can only lower your billed count.
5. 5Set the cap before you switch it onChoose a monthly limit in resolutions. Worst case is that number times $0.75.

Then, before you commit to a year:

How the $0.75 compares with other AI meters

The definitions matter as much as the rates, because each vendor counts something different. Our AI resolution pricing comparison goes deeper; this is the short version.

Help Scout's definition is one of the narrowest here, so at the same real outcomes it may bill fewer resolutions than a broad one. We have no data on how many fewer, and we won't guess.

Where Talvo fits, and where it doesn't

Talvo is a chat-first support platform with a flat price per workspace instead of per user: live chat, an AI agent, a shared inbox, two-way email, a knowledge base and automation in one product. It's new, launched in 2026, in beta, with no reviews yet.

Here is the same set of teams on Talvo, using the lowest-cost plan with enough seats for the team (Starter has 5 teammates and 100 resolutions included, Growth has 15 and 500, Scale has 25 and 2,000, with extra resolutions at $0.49). A bigger plan can be cheaper than a smaller one, because it includes more AI resolutions: Team B would pay $294 a month on Starter, against $198 on Growth.

Talvo counts a resolution when the AI answered end to end from a published knowledge base article and no teammate sent a message in that conversation. A hand-off is never billed (the definition). That's close to Help Scout's rule but not identical: Help Scout also voids the charge if the customer searches again or clicks "I still need help," so on the same conversations Help Scout might bill fewer than Talvo does. The gap in the table is mostly the rate and the seats, not the definition.

For the 5-person, 300-resolution team from the headline, the other products we've priced at list come out like this. On Talvo the lowest total depends on billing: on monthly billing Starter ($49 + 200 × $0.49 = $147) edges out Growth ($149), and on annual billing Growth ($119, with 500 resolutions included) beats Starter ($39 + $98 = $137).

Crisp is the cheapest here on our estimate. Its AI bills usage rather than resolutions (we assumed 450 touched conversations, 300 resolved plus 150 handed off), it has more channels, and the tradeoff is that it says it hasn't had a SOC 2 audit. Tidio's figure assumes 700 conversations handled by people (Growth 800 tier, $159) and the same 450 Lyro conversations as Crisp (Lyro 500 tier, $350), so 300 AI conversations alone would come to less. See our Crisp pricing and Zendesk pricing explainers for the detail behind those rows.

Talvo's shape is different from Help Scout's, and one cliff deserves daylight: Starter stops at 5 teammates. The sixth person moves you to Growth, $149 a month ($119 annual). That is the same kind of step as Help Scout's 26th user, only earlier.

Where Help Scout is the better buy: email-first support. Its inbox is built like a mailbox, with multiple Docs sites, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA and SSO available on Pro, SMS and WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger channels, and integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot and Jira. Talvo has none of those channels or integrations today (WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram and Messenger are on the roadmap), no phone, no SOC 2 report, no SAML SSO and no HIPAA. Talvo does include live chat, email and the AI in the base price, and its hosted help center is one site per workspace on every plan, against Help Scout's two to five Docs sites. Per-workspace plans mean adding a teammate up to the plan's limit never changes the bill. For the cost argument in general, see per seat vs flat pricing.

If you do try a switch, Talvo can import a Help Scout help center and contacts from a CSV; past conversations stay in Help Scout. The steps are in switching from another help desk.

Prices and packaging change, so re-check Help Scout's pricing page in the week you buy. If you're weighing it against a chat-first tool, our guide to the best live chat software for small business and the Intercom pricing breakdown use the same style of same-team math.