Help Scout pricing explained (2026)

Help Scout pricing combines a plan priced per user per month with Envoy, its AI add-on, billed per resolution. As of October 2026, Help Scout’s pricing page lists a Free plan for 5 users, then Standard at $25, Plus at $45 and Pro at $75 per user a month on annual billing, or $30, $54 and $90 on monthly billing. Envoy costs $0.75 per resolution.

This guide is for the support lead or founder of an online store who runs Help Scout, or is budgeting for it. Every price below comes from Help Scout’s own pricing page and help centre, read in US dollars on 26 October 2026; Help Scout’s help centre says all amounts in the product and its documentation are in USD. For what Help Scout does for a store, and the alternatives, see our Help Scout alternatives guide.

Source: Help Scout pricing page, USD, as of October 2026. The monthly prices show when you switch the page’s toggle from Annual to Monthly.

What does Help Scout cost in 2026?

Help Scout costs $25 to $75 per user a month on annual billing, or $30 to $90 on monthly billing, as of October 2026, plus $0.75 for each Envoy resolution and any add-ons. A three-person team on Standard pays $75 a month in seats on annual billing; twenty users on Plus pay $900. The Free plan costs nothing for up to 5 users.

The bill has three lines to forecast:

• Users: the plan price times the number of users. Help Scout’s help centre defines a user as “anyone who needs a login to manage or view conversations”, and the account owner counts too.
• Envoy resolutions: $0.75 for each AI chat session resolved without your team, billed the month after.
• Add-ons: extra Inboxes, Docs sites and light users, plus security and onboarding add-ons on some plans.

Annual billing lowers the per-user price; the pricing page labels it “-16%” ($25 instead of $30 on Standard). Help Scout bills the plan in advance and Envoy resolutions in arrears.

What are the Help Scout pricing plans?

Help Scout’s pricing page lists four plans in October 2026: Free, Standard, Plus and Pro. All paid plans are priced per user per month and include unlimited contacts. Plans differ by user limits, channels, AI features, workflows and security. Standard and Plus come with a free trial; Pro is sold through a demo.

• Free ($0): 5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site and 100 contacts a month, with 10 saved replies, 10 tags and 30 days of reporting history.
• Standard ($25, or $30 monthly): up to 25 users and 2 Inboxes. Adds live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, basic workflows, one basic SLA policy and AI Assist, which expands, shortens, edits or translates text.
• Plus ($45, or $54 monthly): up to 50 users and 5 Inboxes. Adds advanced workflows, AI Drafts and AI Summarize, a customer portal, round robin routing, the Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot integrations and 5 light users. Help Scout marks it “Popular”.
• Pro ($75, or $90 monthly): unlimited users with a minimum of 10, 10 Inboxes, unlimited workflows and SLA policies, SSO/SAML, HIPAA compliance, 15 light users, a dedicated onboarding specialist and preferred pricing on Aircall.

Phone and voice run through integrations on every paid plan, according to the plan comparison. For which kind of help desk fits a store, see our guide to the e-commerce helpdesk.

How does Help Scout bill its AI?

Help Scout bills its customer-facing AI per resolution: Envoy costs $0.75 for each AI chat session that ends without your team, as of October 2026. Resolutions are billed monthly in arrears, and you can cap them with a monthly limit. AI Assist, AI Drafts and AI Summarize, the AI tools for your team, are included in the plans that list them, with no usage fee.

Sources: Help Scout pricing page, Envoy page and help centre article on AI resolutions pricing, read on 26 October 2026.

The names have moved. The pricing page sells the add-on as Envoy while its FAQ still calls it AI Answers; the Envoy page says “Envoy is Help Scout’s suite of tools” for resolving requests automatically and “Scout is our built-in AI agent”. Both refer to the same $0.75 per resolution.

Help Scout’s own pages differ on the Free plan. The help centre article on AI resolutions says Scout is “available in all Help Scout plans”, while the plan comparison on the pricing page lists Envoy at $0.75 per resolution on Standard, Plus and Pro and not on Free. The same article says customers on any paid plan are charged per resolution. Ask Help Scout before you plan to run Envoy on the Free plan.

What counts as a resolution?

A resolution is “a single AI chat session that is resolved without help from a human”, in the words of Help Scout’s help centre. You are charged when Scout answers the customer’s question and the customer asks for no more help after the last AI reply. You pay once per session, even if Scout answers several questions in it.

• Scout answers and the customer stops there: one resolution, $0.75.
• The customer asks for more help, in their own words or with the “I still need help” button: no charge.
• The customer escalates or searches the knowledge base after the answer: no charge, according to the pricing FAQ.
• Scout only greets the customer or asks a follow-up question: no charge.

Envoy runs on your website and in your app as of 26 October 2026; the Envoy page marks email as “Coming Soon!”. Billable conversations are listed under Reports, then Scout. Our Help Scout alternatives guide covers what Scout answers from.

What happens when you reach the spending limit?

When Envoy reaches the monthly limit you set, Scout is switched off in your Beacon until the next billing cycle or until you raise the limit, and Beacon falls back to its other support options. Help Scout emails you as you approach the cap. Raising the limit takes effect within an hour; lowering it below current usage applies from the next cycle.

On annual billing, Envoy charges are taken from the credit of your annual prepayment, so that credit runs out sooner than a year, according to Help Scout’s help centre. Existing Help Scout customers who start using Scout get no free trial; the 3-month trial is for new accounts.

What do AI Drafts and the other AI tools cost?

On current plans, AI Assist is included on Standard, Plus and Pro, and AI Drafts and AI Summarize on Plus and Pro, each marked unlimited in the plan comparison. Help Scout’s help centre says older user-based plans paid for AI Drafts separately, at $50 per 100 conversations where a draft is generated; check Your Plan if your account is older.

Does Help Scout charge per contact?

Not on the plans it sells in October 2026. Help Scout’s paid plans are priced per user and include unlimited contacts; only the Free plan caps contacts, at 100 a month. Help Scout’s help centre keeps a separate guide for accounts on contact-based billing, which says those accounts pay by the number of contacts helped each month.

That guide defines a contact as “someone you’ve helped”: an email conversation with at least one reply from your team, a chat your team accepted and replied to, or a question resolved by Scout. One person counts once per billing cycle, across channels, and the tier follows the average of your last three months.

The pricing page lists only per-user plans, so check Your Plan in Help Scout to see which model your account uses. The help centre’s user-based billing guide states that it “does not accurately reflect details for the contact-based billing accounts”.

What does Help Scout cost at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 tickets a month?

With published prices only, a store pays about $300 a month at 1,000 tickets, $1,575 at 5,000 and $3,150 at 10,000 on annual billing, or $315, $1,665 and $3,330 on monthly billing. These are illustrations built on our own assumptions, not Help Scout quotes:

• 30% of tickets end in an Envoy resolution, one ticket being one conversation.
• Team sizes of 3, 10 and 20 users, on Standard for the smallest team and Plus for the others. Standard allows up to 25 users, so all three teams fit it; we put the two larger teams on Plus because it adds AI Drafts, advanced workflows and round robin routing, which teams at that volume often use. The table also shows both teams on Standard.
• Contacts do not change the price, because paid plans include unlimited contacts.
• No Envoy trial, prepaid discount or spending limit applies.

Prices from Help Scout’s pricing page in USD, as of October 2026. Team sizes, plans, billing terms and the 30% rate are our assumptions, not Help Scout figures; the sums exclude tax, add-ons and voice integrations.

The arithmetic is the same in every column: users times the plan price, plus Envoy resolutions times $0.75. On annual billing the user line is paid upfront for the year: $900 for 3 Standard users, $5,400 for 10 Plus users and $10,800 for 20 Plus users. Envoy is charged monthly in arrears and taken from that annual credit.

Envoy works on website chat and in-app today, with email marked “Coming Soon!”, so the 30% rate assumes enough of your tickets reach Help Scout through those channels. If most of your tickets arrive by email, fewer reach Envoy and the AI line is smaller.

At 10,000 tickets a month, every extra 10 percentage points of Envoy resolutions adds 1,000 resolutions, which is $750 a month at $0.75. Monthly instead of annual billing adds $9 per user a month on Plus ($54 instead of $45): $90 for 10 users and $180 for 20.

What else should you budget for?

Beyond users and Envoy, Help Scout lists add-ons priced per month, usage-based Messages above an included allowance, and add-ons on the lower plans for features Pro includes. Annual billing lowers the user price and the price of some add-ons. The table lists the items Help Scout names on its pricing page and help centre in October 2026.

Sources: Help Scout pricing page, and help centre articles on annual payments and Messages pricing, USD, read on 26 October 2026. Help Scout’s user-based billing guide gives extra Docs sites as $20 a month without the monthly rate, and uses “Standard plan paying $25/month” in a proration example, which matches the annual rate on today’s pricing page.

• Annual or monthly: annual billing is a prepayment held as credit on your account, and each month’s users, Docs sites, add-ons and usage charges are taken from it. Adding users or upgrading uses the credit faster.
• Adding users mid-cycle: a new user is charged pro rata at your next billing date; users added and removed within 24 hours are not charged.
• Discounts: a 10% discount for non-profits, which can be combined with the annual discount, the Help Scout for Good programme (up to 100% off for qualifying organisations) and a startup plan.
• Refunds: a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first payment, monthly or annual.
• Payment: major credit cards; wire or ACH transfer for annual prepayments over $2,500.

How do you forecast your Help Scout bill?

Forecast a Help Scout bill from two numbers: the users who need a login and the tickets Envoy will resolve. Pick the plan whose user limit and features fit, multiply users by its price, estimate peak-month Envoy resolutions and multiply by $0.75, then add the add-ons you need and confirm the result with Help Scout.

1. Users: count everyone who needs a full login, including the account owner, and multiply by the plan price, annual or monthly.
2. Plan limits: Standard allows up to 25 users and Plus up to 50; Pro starts at 10 users.
3. Peak volume: use your busiest month, such as Black Friday or a sale, not the average.
4. Envoy resolutions: estimate the share of chat and in-app conversations Scout will resolve without your team, and multiply by $0.75.
5. Spending limit: decide whether to cap resolutions; at the cap, Beacon falls back to your other support options until the next cycle.
6. Add-ons: add extra Inboxes, Docs sites, light users, Messages and security add-ons.
7. Check the model: confirm in Your Plan whether your account is on current per-user, older per-user or contact-based billing, and ask about prepaid resolution prices.

Help Scout’s pricing and Envoy pages include a savings calculator for Envoy. For a store, the useful number is the cost of each resolved ticket at your own mix of order, return and delivery questions. If you are weighing other help desks, our Help Scout alternatives guide, the small-business help desk guide and our Zendesk pricing explainer cover the field.

Where does Engaige fit?

Engaige (that’s us) is the e-commerce-native AI support agent that plugs into the Help Scout you already run, actually resolves across your stack and keeps improving itself. Keep your helpdesk. Replace the AI. Behind the agent is Engaige AI, which learns from your conversations and inputs, configures your support agent and shows which policies it used.

How it is priced. Engaige is a flat monthly fee tied to your ticket volume, predictable as you scale. You keep your Help Scout plan for your team; Engaige works inside it through our Help Scout integration, with no migration of conversations, saved replies or history.

How it works in Help Scout. Engaige is live in Agent Assist in hours. Every reply your team sends is compared with what the agent suggested, one of the signals Engaige AI learns from, and it proposes changes with its reasoning for you to approve. Ticket types go autonomous one at a time; once autonomous, Engaige takes the action, replies to the customer and closes the conversation in Help Scout.

Built for the store. Engaige reasons in the order lifecycle: where an order is, whether it can still change, whether a return is inside the window. On Shopify it combines live Admin API data with the marketing content from your storefront, and takes native actions such as refunds, cancellations and address changes. At Otrium, Engaige resolves 60% of 120,000 annual tickets end to end.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Help Scout cost per user?

As of October 2026, Help Scout’s US pricing page lists Standard at $25, Plus at $45 and Pro at $75 per user a month on annual billing, or $30, $54 and $90 on monthly billing. Pro needs at least 10 users. The Free plan costs nothing for up to 5 users.

Is there a free plan or a free trial?

Yes, both. Help Scout’s Free plan includes 5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site and 100 contacts a month. Standard and Plus come with a 15-day free trial and no credit card needed; for a Pro trial, Help Scout points you to its sales team. New accounts also get 3 months of free, unlimited Envoy resolutions.

How are Help Scout AI resolutions counted?

One resolution is one AI chat session that Scout resolves without your team. You are charged $0.75 when Scout answers and the customer asks for no more help after the last reply, once per session. Sessions where the customer asks for more help, escalates or only gets a greeting are not charged.

Does Help Scout charge per contact?

Not on its current plans. Paid plans are priced per user and include unlimited contacts; the Free plan allows 100 contacts a month. Accounts on Help Scout’s contact-based billing pay by contacts helped each month, under a separate help centre guide, so check Your Plan to see which model applies.

Does annual billing cost less than monthly billing?

Yes. Plus costs $45 per user a month paid yearly against $54 paid monthly, and the pricing page labels annual “-16%”. Annual billing is a prepayment held as credit, and Envoy charges are also taken from that credit.

What does Help Scout cost for 10,000 tickets a month?

With 20 users on Plus and 30% of tickets resolved by Envoy, published prices add up to $3,150 a month on annual billing or $3,330 on monthly billing, before add-ons. On Pro, the same team comes to $3,750 on annual billing. Your own team size and automation rate change the sum.

Can I keep Help Scout and use Engaige?

Yes. Engaige plugs into the Help Scout you already run and replaces the AI on your conversations, with no migration. It is priced as a flat monthly fee tied to your ticket volume, predictable as you scale. Keep your helpdesk, replace the AI.