Help Scout pricing, plans per user and AI Answers

Help Scout pricing is set per user, per month. Standard, the first paid plan, is $25 a user a month billed yearly or $30 monthly, Plus is $45 or $54, and Pro is $75 or $90 for at least 10 users. A free plan covers up to 5 users and 100 contacts a month. AI Answers, the AI agent that answers in Help Scout’s Beacon widget, costs $0.75 for each conversation it resolves, after 3 free months for a new account. We read every figure in US dollars on Help Scout’s pricing page and help centre on 25 September 2026.

Deacon is ours, and it isn’t a shared inbox. It’s an AI customer support agent for founders who answer support themselves. It answers your customers in seconds from your own docs, brings you the conversations that need a person and shows you what customers are asking for. There’s a free plan, and it needs no card.

Help Scout pricing plans

Help Scout sells four plans, and every paid one is priced per user. The pricing page opens on yearly billing, which it labels 16% off, and the yearly price is paid for the year ahead.

Every figure is on Help Scout’s pricing page, the monthly ones behind its Monthly switch. Yearly billing takes 16.7% off every plan, since $25 against $30, $45 against $54 and $75 against $90 all come to the same share. The sums are ours.

An extra inbox is $10 a month billed yearly, or $12 monthly, and an extra Docs site $20 or $24. Light users, who can read and collaborate on conversations without a full seat, come only with Plus and Pro, and more can be bought up to 25 on Plus and 50 on Pro. Standard and Plus have a 15-day trial with no card, and Pro starts with a demo.

Help Scout’s billing guide fills in the rest. The account owner counts as a user. A user added partway through a month is charged for the days left, at your next bill. Your first payment has a 30-day money-back guarantee, and non-profits get 10% off, which adds to the yearly discount.

Help Scout’s free plan

Help Scout’s free plan gives up to 5 users one shared email inbox, one Docs site of up to 10 articles and one Beacon, the help widget for your site, with no payment method. It includes 10 saved replies, 10 tags, 30 days of reports and one app integration. It has no live chat and, apart from a trial of AI Answers, no AI tools.

The limit that matters is 100 contacts a month. Help Scout’s free plan article counts a contact as someone you helped, by an email conversation with at least one reply, a phone conversation logged in Help Scout or a question AI Answers resolved, and one person counts once however many channels they use. The count resets each monthly cycle. Once you reach 100, you can’t reply to anyone, by email, chat or AI Answers, until the next cycle or until you upgrade, though customers’ emails keep arriving.

Two more details sit in that article. Emails you send from the free plan carry “Sent with Help Scout” in the footer. It also says you can connect Instagram and Facebook Messenger, while the pricing page’s table starts both on Standard, so check in your account before counting on them.

If you’re weighing a free helpdesk, free ticketing systems sets Help Scout’s free plan beside the other hosted free plans and the open source helpdesks you run yourself.

AI Answers and what Help Scout’s AI costs

AI Answers is Help Scout’s AI agent for your customers, and its Agent page now calls it Compass. It answers in Beacon on your site or in your app, from your Docs sites and from websites, PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets and Google Docs you add, and you resync a source by hand when it changes. The pricing page sells it as an add-on.

• The price. $0.75 a resolution, the same on monthly and yearly billing, with prepaid discounts available. No plan includes any resolutions.
• What counts. A resolution is a chat that AI Answers settled without your team. Help Scout’s AI pricing article charges one only when AI Answers gave an answer and the customer didn’t ask for more help after its last reply, once per chat however many questions it answered. A greeting or a follow-up question on its own isn’t charged, and nor is a chat where the customer asks for more help or presses “I still need help”.
• The free months. A new account gets 3 months of unlimited resolutions free, counted from the day it signs up. An existing customer who switches it on later gets no trial. After the trial, AI Answers needs a paid plan.
• The bill. Resolutions are billed the month after they happen. On yearly billing they’re taken from the credit you prepaid, so that credit runs out before the year does.
• The cap. You can set a monthly spending limit. Help Scout emails you as you near it, and at the limit AI Answers switches off in Beacon until the next cycle or until you raise the limit, while Beacon falls back to its search or contact options.

A resolution also counts as a contact, which matters on the free plan. How that compares with Zendesk’s allowance or Intercom’s $0.99 outcome is set out in AI help desks.

Help Scout’s AI for your own team is priced into the seat.

Docs and Beacon

Docs is Help Scout’s knowledge base, and it comes with the inbox rather than on its own. Help Scout’s billing guide says Docs isn’t sold as a separate product, though you can buy the cheapest plan and use only Docs. The free plan has 1 site of up to 10 articles, Standard 2, Plus 3 and Pro 5, and the paid plans have no limit on articles. Custom site branding starts on Standard, sites you can restrict to chosen readers on Plus, and an extra site is $20 a month billed yearly or $24 monthly. The best knowledge base software for small teams sets Docs beside the help centres you can buy on their own.

Beacon is the widget that puts Help Scout on your site or in your app. On every plan it can suggest help articles by page and offer a contact form that lands in your inbox. Live chat, messages you send to visitors, and surveys start on Standard, and AI Answers runs inside it. The free plan has 1 Beacon, Standard 5 and Plus and Pro as many as you like.

Standard’s Beacon carries a small “Powered by Help Scout” mark, and Help Scout’s Beacon guide lets only Plus and Pro switch it off, so removing it starts at $45 a user a month billed yearly.

Help Scout for Startups

Help Scout for Startups gives 6 months of Plus and AI Answers free, with help getting started. It’s for new Help Scout customers that are incorporated tech startups less than two years old, with under $1 million in annual recurring revenue. The page doesn’t say what you pay once the 6 months end, or whether AI Answers has a limit in that time. Non-profits and B Corps can apply to Help Scout for Good instead, which the billing guide says takes up to 100% off for organisations working on human rights, environmental sustainability or under-representation in tech.

Zendesk and Intercom run startup programmes too, and customer support for startups sets their terms side by side.

What Help Scout costs a team of one, three and five

These are the seats alone for one, three and five users. Pro has a minimum of 10 users, so a smaller team pays for 10. The sums are ours.

AI Answers comes on top once the free 3 months are over. At 100 resolutions a month it adds $75, so one person on Standard billed yearly pays $100 a month, three pay $150 and five pay $200. At 500 resolutions it adds $375, and the AI costs more than the seats for any of these teams on Standard.

For a founder who wants live chat and the AI on the site, the row that matters is Standard. Billed yearly, one user is $300 for the year, paid up front. The free plan suits one to five people who answer by email and help up to 100 people a month, but it has no chat and no AI after the trial. Plus is the plan to price if you want Help Scout’s mark off your Beacon or its AI to draft replies for you.

For a Help Scout pricing comparison, Zendesk pricing, Intercom pricing and Freshdesk pricing work through those helpdesks’ bills, Help Scout vs Zendesk and Help Scout vs Intercom set Help Scout beside each one line by line, and customer support tools prices the other kinds of tool a small team buys.

Deacon, for a founder who doesn’t need a shared inbox

Help Scout’s price is built for a few people sharing one inbox, with a seat for each and a meter on the AI. Early on, support is often one founder, and the problem isn’t two people replying to the same email. It’s the same questions arriving every day. Deacon is built for that founder, and there’s no inbox to run.

You add one script tag and point Deacon at your docs, and it answers your customers in seconds, at any hour, in the language they write in. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of guessing and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave it or ask for a person, and you reply from Deacon’s dashboard. While their chat is open, your reply appears there under your first name and your company’s.

Each question your docs missed waits in Conversations with an Answer this button. Every answer you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so the more you answer, the less it needs you.

You also see what customers need, from everyone who asks rather than the loudest few. Topics group their questions, count the people asking and label most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on, on every plan.

Every feature is on every plan, and each plan includes its seats. Free is 50 answers a month and 1 seat, with no card and no end date. Starter is $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers a month and 3 seats. Growth is $150 a month, or $120 a month billed yearly, for 4,000 answers a month and 10 seats. Nothing is billed past your plan’s answers and no plan upgrades itself. There’s no “powered by” line on any plan, so there’s no badge to pay to remove.

Questions about Help Scout pricing

Does Help Scout have a free plan?

Yes. It covers up to 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site of up to 10 articles and 1 Beacon, with no payment method, and Help Scout’s pages give it no end date. It stops you replying once you’ve helped 100 contacts in a month, and it has no live chat. AI Answers can be tried free for the first 3 months, and after that it needs a paid plan.

How much does Help Scout cost for one person?

Standard is $25 a month billed yearly, or $30 monthly, and it includes live chat. AI Answers then adds $0.75 for each resolution once the free 3 months are over, so a month with 100 resolutions comes to $100 on yearly billing. The free plan costs nothing if you help up to 100 people a month by email.

Is Help Scout priced per user or per contact?

Per user, on the plans its pricing page sells today. Help Scout’s help centre keeps a separate guide for contact-based plans, billed by how many people an account helps each month and set by the average of the last three months. That guide says it doesn’t apply to per-user plans, and the pricing page sells none of the contact-based ones, so it describes accounts already on them. The free plan is the one current plan that counts contacts.

Can I pay for Help Scout monthly?

Yes, on every paid plan, at $30, $54 and $90 a user against $25, $45 and $75 billed yearly. AI Answers is billed monthly either way, after the month it’s used.

Does Help Scout offer discounts?

Four. Yearly billing takes 16.7% off, Help Scout for Startups gives 6 months of Plus and AI Answers free, non-profits get 10% off, and Help Scout for Good takes up to 100% off for organisations whose mission it supports. Prepaid AI resolutions are discounted too, by up to 33% on Help Scout’s AI agent page, through its sales team.

Can Deacon replace Help Scout?

If you answer support yourself and most questions are ones your docs already answer, yes. Deacon answers them on your website and hands you the ones that need a person, in its own dashboard. It isn’t a shared inbox, though. It has no support inbox for email, no tickets, routing or SLAs, no WhatsApp, SMS, social channels or phone, no help centre of its own and no integrations, and it always declines questions about a visitor’s own account. If two or three of you share an email address, Help Scout does that job and Deacon doesn’t.