Help Scout

Identify the subscription before calculating

Current pricing lists two inboxes on Standard. The pricing page lists $25 per user per month billed annually or $30 monthly. Free includes up to five users, one inbox and 100 contacts helped per month. Paid plans list unlimited contacts. Confirm your actual account and contract terms.

A contact is someone who received a team reply or an AI resolution, and multiple conversations with that person count as one contact. Some accounts use a separate contact-based plan, with tiers based on recent usage. Do not apply its tier calculation to a current user-based quote without checking the account.

Map people, inboxes and channels

Standard lists multiple inboxes, live chat, SMS and social messaging in its plan table. An inbox is a shared workspace, a user is a teammate, and a contact is the customer helped: they are different units. Confirm channel availability, carrier or provider charges and the number of Docs sites in the quoted plan. Assign owners for unassigned work and after-hours follow-up.

Distinguish a draft from an autonomous answer

Scout, evolved from AI Answers, is documented for Beacon and email. AI Drafts instead prepares text for a teammate to review and send; its availability and billing vary by plan and account cohort.

The AI resolution guide describes $0.75 per resolution on monthly pay-as-you-go, billed in arrears, with a free three-month trial for new customers and no equivalent initial trial for existing customers. A session is charged once when Scout answers and the customer does not ask for further help; a greeting, unanswered follow-up or request for more help is not charged under the documented conditions. Confirm email, reopening and handoff edge cases for your account.

Keep the answer source current

Help Scout’s guidance says sources other than Help Scout Docs need manual resync after changes. Give the knowledge owner a refresh checklist and check the behavior of private or restricted material before enabling it. A source’s presence in the configuration does not prove a customer is entitled to its contents.

Test handoff and migration with synthetic cases

Test a customer request for a person, an unavailable agent, a stale article and a message routed to the wrong inbox. Check the receiving teammate’s context and notifications. Before moving mailboxes, inventory conversation history, customer identities, attachments, rules, channel connections and reporting; verify exactly what each import or export preserves. A CSV is not a complete migration.

Compare the cost of the same work

Intercom pairs seats with Fin outcomes; Crisp uses a workspace package and token-based AI credits. The Intercom comparison sets out a matched workload.

Common questions

Is Help Scout still priced by contacts?

Some existing accounts have contact-based plans. Current pricing presents user-based paid plans; verify the account cohort.

Is Scout the same as AI Drafts?

No. Scout can answer autonomously, while AI Drafts creates text for human review.

Sources and scope

We read the linked vendor pricing and documentation on November 5, 2026.

This is a documentation-only assessment: we have not tested the products, integrations, AI answers or support. Prices and plan terms can change.

Inclusion and corrections are free; sponsorship does not determine our conclusions.

Sponsorship never changes this page. How we research.