Help Scout Pricing

Help Scout charges per user per month, so the bill follows headcount and ticket volume barely touches it. The one usage meter is Envoy, Help Scout's AI suite, at $0.75 for each conversation its built-in agent, Scout, resolves. Help Scout's pricing page opens on the annual toggle, so the first figure most buyers see is the discounted one; the plan table above shows both.

How the billing works

• Standard $30, Plus $54 and Pro $90 per user a month billed monthly, or $25, $45 and $75 billed annually
• Annual billing saves $5 of every $30, which Help Scout's toggle labels -16%
• Contacts are unlimited on every paid plan, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one until the AI is switched on
• Plus and Pro add light users, which Help Scout describes as teammates who view conversations and collaborate without taking up a full user seat. 5 come with Plus and 15 with Pro, up to 25 on Plus and 50 on Pro. No price is published for more
• Free covers 5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site and 100 contacts a month. A contact is anyone who got a reply or an AI resolution, and at 100 replies stop until the next cycle
• Standard and Plus have a 15-day trial with no card; Pro is sold through a demo

Where each plan stops

• Standard: up to 25 users, 2 Inboxes, 2 Docs sites, 5 Beacons, 150 basic workflows, 1 basic SLA policy, 2 years of report history
• Plus: up to 50 users, 5 Inboxes, 3 Docs sites, 500 advanced workflows, 2 advanced SLA policies, all-time reports, round robin routing, the Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot integrations, AI Drafts and AI Summarize
• Pro: unlimited users with a 10-user minimum, 10 Inboxes, 5 Docs sites, unlimited workflows and SLA policies, SSO/SAML, HIPAA, a dedicated onboarding specialist and a strategic account manager

The cost of crossing a seat cap

• 25 users on Standard billed annually is 25 × $25 = $625 a month. The 26th user means Plus: 26 × $45 = $1,170, so one hire adds $545 a month
• 50 users on Plus billed annually is 50 × $45 = $2,250 a month. The 51st means Pro: 51 × $75 = $3,825, so one hire adds $1,575 a month
• Pro's floor is 10 × $75 = $750 a month billed annually, or 10 × $90 = $900 billed monthly, whatever your actual headcount
• The hire that crosses a cap reprices every seat, so budget for it before the offer goes out

What the headline price leaves out

• Envoy: $0.75 per resolution, billed monthly, on every paid plan. The pricing FAQ still calls it AI Answers
• Extra Inboxes: $10 a month each billed annually, $12 billed monthly, up to 20 on Standard, 50 on Plus and unlimited on Pro
• Extra Docs sites: $20 a month each billed annually, $24 billed monthly
• SSO/SAML and IP restrictions are unpriced add-ons on Standard and Plus. HIPAA shows as an unpriced add-on on Plus only, and Help Scout's HIPAA documentation says it is only included in Pro and needs a signed BAA, plus an AI Feature Healthcare Addendum to use the AI features
• Phone runs through Aircall, an add-on on Standard and Plus with preferred pricing on Pro. Help Scout's page gives no Aircall figure
• Help Scout's comparison table lists an onboarding specialist and a CSM as unpriced add-ons; both come with Pro

How the AI is billed

• A resolution is one conversation Scout settles without a person, charged once however many questions it answers
• Nothing is charged if the customer escalates, searches the knowledge base, asks more questions or clicks "I still need help"
• A monthly spending cap switches the AI off for the rest of the cycle when it is reached, with email warnings on the way
• New accounts get 3 months of unlimited free resolutions counted from the day the account is created, so a slow setup eats into the trial
• Prepaying for resolutions saves up to 33%, per Help Scout's Envoy page; the prepay steps aren't published
• Scout, Envoy's built-in agent, answers in website and in-app chat today. Email answering and connections to payment processors and CRMs are marked Coming Soon, so it answers questions and cannot issue a refund

A worked example

An eight-person team on Plus, billed annually, with six Inboxes (one over the five included), assuming Scout resolves 400 conversations a month:

• Seats: 8 × $45 = $360
• Extra Inbox: 1 × $10 = $10
• Envoy: 400 × $0.75 = $300
• Total: $670 a month, $8,040 a year
• Billed monthly, the seats are 8 × $54 = $432 and the Inbox $12, so $744 a month and $8,928 a year
• Annual billing saves $888 a year here. Envoy costs the same on both and is the only line that grows with volume

Which plan fits which team

• Free suits a founder or two answering email for a small store. The hard stop at 100 contacts makes it risky through a launch or a sale
• Standard covers email, chat, WhatsApp and social DMs for a team of up to 25 that can live with one SLA policy and basic workflows. SMS is on the Standard card, but the comparison table marks it as via integration, so confirm before you rely on it
• Plus is where we would put most ecommerce teams of 5 to 50, because round robin routing, advanced workflows and AI Drafts all start here
• Pro earns its price when you need HIPAA, SSO without an add-on, more than 50 users or more than two SLA policies. Below 10 users you pay for empty seats
• Per-user pricing is the opposite trade to Gorgias, which bills on tickets and caps seats only loosely (3 on Starter, 500 on Basic). Help Scout gets cheaper per conversation as volume grows and dearer as the team grows

How we checked this

• Plan prices, seat and Inbox limits, light users, add-on prices, the resolution rules and the FAQ: Help Scout's rendered pricing page on both billing toggles, https://www.helpscout.com/pricing/, read by our pricing monitor on 2026-10-24 and checked again on 2026-10-29
• Envoy and Scout, the prepay discount, Scout's channels and what it can't do yet: https://www.helpscout.com/agent/, checked 2026-10-29
• Which plan includes HIPAA and the agreements it needs: https://docs.helpscout.com/article/330-hipaa, checked 2026-10-29
• Prices change; the last-verified date on each plan in the table is the one to trust