Intercom Review
Help desk with an omnichannel inbox and ticketing, built together with the Fin AI agent.
- From:
- $39/agent/mo
- Founded:
- 2011
- HQ:
- San Francisco, CA, USA
Intercom is a help desk and an AI agent sold as one product: the shared inbox, ticketing and help center on one side, Fin answering customers on the other, both working from the same customer record. It is priced on two meters at once, seats for your agents and a per-outcome charge for Fin, so the bill depends as much on how Intercom counts an outcome as on headcount. The pricing page sells in-app tours and banners alongside support, and Intercom lists ecommerce as one of its target industries.
Is it right for your team?
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Points for
Points against
Tick what describes you. We'll weigh it against this review.
What it does
- Shared inbox and ticketing on every plan, with tickets for customer issues, back-office work and tracker tickets that link many customers to one widespread problem
- Live chat, support email, in-app chat, banners and tooltips are included free and unlimited on all plans
- Email campaigns, SMS, WhatsApp and phone run as pay-as-you-go channels billed on top of seats
- Fin answers across phone, email, chat and Slack, and Intercom says it can pull customer data and take actions through APIs or MCP
- Integrations named on Intercom's own homepage include Slack, Shopify and GitHub. How deep the Shopify connection goes (whether an agent or Fin can cancel, refund or edit an order) was not on the pages we read
- Fin Simulations run complete test conversations before Fin goes live
- Public help center and pre-built reports on the entry plan
- Missing on the entry plan: workflows automation builder, round robin assignment and more than one team inbox (Advanced and up), plus SSO, HIPAA support, SLAs and multibrand Messenger or help center (Expert only)
- Not confirmed: Instagram and Facebook Messenger appear on neither page we read, so we cannot say whether they are channels or missing
Pricing at a glance
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $39 | $29 | Fin AI Agent at $0.99 per outcome on top of seats |
| Advanced | $99 | $85 | Fin AI Agent at $0.99 per outcome. |
| Expert | $139 | $132 | Fin AI Agent at $0.99 per outcome. |
Prices are an agent a month, in US dollars. Source: intercom.com/pricing, checked .
- Seats are $29, $85 or $132 per seat a month billed annually on Essential, Advanced and Expert ($39, $99 or $139 billed monthly). On 2026-10-29 new customers were offered Essential at $19 billed annually or $29 billed monthly. Full breakdown, with a worked cost for an eight-agent team, on the Intercom pricing page.
- Fin bills $0.99 per outcome on every plan, at most once per conversation. An outcome includes a customer who asks for nothing more after Fin's reply, and a Procedure that ends in a handoff to an agent.
- Unlimited Copilot ($29 per agent a month paid yearly, $35 monthly), Pro ($0.20 per conversation, 500-conversation monthly minimum) and metered SMS, WhatsApp and phone all bill on top of seats. Live chat, support email and in-app chat are free on every plan.
AI pricing
- Fin: $0.99 per outcome on every plan, charged at most once per conversation however many questions Fin answers. You can set spending limits
- What counts as an outcome: the customer confirms the issue is resolved, or the customer doesn't ask for more help after Fin responds, or Fin completes a workflow (a Procedure), *including handoffs*
- That second trigger matters in practice. A customer who reads a wrong answer and closes the chat is still a billed outcome, and so is a Procedure that ends by passing the customer to an agent. Budget for outcomes to run higher than the conversations Fin actually resolved
- Scale check: 3,000 Fin outcomes in a month is $2,970 on top of seats
- Fin on another help desk: $0.99 per outcome, no seats, with a minimum monthly commitment (the FAQ's example is 50 outcomes)
- Copilot (agent assistant): $29 per agent per month billed annually, $35 per agent per month billed monthly, for unlimited use. The free allowance is 10 Copilot and 10 auto-translation conversations per agent a month, which a busy agent can use up before lunch on day one
- Pro add-on: from $100 a month (billing basis not stated), covering analysis of 500 conversations and 6,000 credits a month for Operator, Intercom's agent for customer operations. Extra credits are $0.01 each. The page does not say how many credits a given action costs, only that complex work uses more, so set the hard limit before you let a team loose on it
- Proactive Support Plus: $99 a month (billing basis not stated) for 500 outbound messages. The per-message price beyond that is not published on the page
- What we could not verify: which order actions, if any, Fin can take in Shopify. "Takes action on external systems" is the only claim on the pricing page
Before you commit
- Read the outcome definition before the Fin forecast: silence and Procedure handoffs are billable
- Get the WhatsApp, SMS and phone rates in writing. They sit behind a separate channel pricing link, not on the main pricing page
- SSO, HIPAA support and SLAs are Expert-only, and Expert is missing from the FAQ's list of self-serve plans
- Downgrades usually take effect at renewal. On an annual plan, an over-bought tier is yours for the year
- Copilot's free allowance is a demo, not a working quota. Price it at $29 or $35 per agent if your team will rely on it
- Compare like with like: the headline $29 is the annual rate, so set it against other desks' annual prices, or use $39 against their monthly ones
- We did not verify data hosting region, uptime commitments or status history. Ask about all three if you're in the EU or need a contractual SLA
Who should buy it, and who should skip it
Who should buy
- Ecommerce and app brands whose chat queue is mostly repeat policy questions Fin can answer from a help center
- Teams that want AI and human agents in one inbox and one customer record rather than a bot bolted onto a separate desk
- Teams that want a hard monthly cap on AI spend
- Brands that also want in-app or on-site messages, banners and tours from the same vendor
Who should skip it
- Shopify brands that need agents to edit or refund orders inside the ticket: confirm it in the trial, because we could not verify it
- Phone-first or WhatsApp-heavy teams that need a predictable bill, since those channels are metered at rates not on the pricing page
- Small teams that need SSO, which forces the top plan
- Teams that need round robin assignment but are budgeting at the $29 entry price, or at $39 if they pay monthly
- Buyers who want AI billed only on confirmed resolutions
How we checked this
Plan names, Fin, Copilot, Pro and Proactive Support Plus figures, seat rules and contract terms were read from the text of Intercom's pricing page on 2026-10-09; channel and integration claims came from Intercom's homepage the same day. Seat prices in both billing states were checked against screenshots of the rendered pricing page, set to billed annually and to billed monthly, taken the same day. We tried to read Intercom's channel pricing, security, data hosting and status pages, but those fetches did not complete, so this review makes no claims about channel rates, data residency, uptime or compliance beyond what the pricing page lists per plan. No review-site text was used.
Channels
How each channel is delivered, and the plan it starts on. Native, through an integration, or absent.
The Messenger widget and the ticketing system are included on Essential, Advanced and Expert.
Support email free and unlimited on all plans; email campaigns are billed per bulk email.
Live chat, in-app chat, banners and tooltips free and unlimited on all plans (Messenger).
Phone is pay-as-you-go, usage-based; rates are not on the pricing page. The omnichannel page describes native calling with video, screen sharing and no-code IVR routing.
Pay-as-you-go, charged per message, varying by region; rates not on the pricing page.
Instagram and Facebook Messenger are free apps on Advanced or Expert. TikTok isn't mentioned on the pages read.
Pay-as-you-go, charged per message sent, varying by market and message type; rates not on the pricing page.
Checked on the vendor’s own pages, .
AI and automation
What the AI does, what it costs, and what the desk automates without it.
10 Copilot conversations per teammate a month included; unlimited is $29 per teammate a month billed annually or $35 billed monthly, full seats only.
Fin AI Agent included on Essential, Advanced and Expert, billed at $0.99 per outcome on top of seats. An outcome is a confirmed resolution, no further request after Fin replies, or a completed Procedure including handoffs; charged at most once per conversation.
Fin uses Procedures and Shopify APIs for order status, returns, refunds, exchanges, order updates and cancellations; Fin for ecommerce is listed on Essential. The older Fin Tasks article says to discuss Procedures access with an account manager. A completed Procedure counts as a $0.99 outcome.
$0.99 per Fin outcome, with the outcome definition published in the pricing FAQ.
Workflows automation builder and round robin assignment start on Advanced.
Fin Attributes detect topic, intent, urgency or sentiment during a Fin step, and a Workflow branch routes on them. Workflows start on Advanced. Attributes are detected on conversations, not tickets.
Personal and shared macros combine a reply with actions (tag, assign, snooze, close); usable in bulk and on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Macros on ticket creation are on all plans that include Tickets, which all three plans do.
Fin Voice answers phone calls and can run Procedures during a call (refunds, credits, order edits). The $0.99 outcome price covers chat and email only; Fin Voice pricing is through Sales.
Checked on the vendor’s own pages, .
Compare Intercom
What’s new in Intercom
The latest from Intercom’s own changelog, linked to each post.
- Import your schedule from a spreadsheet
intercom.com
- Customer Portal Improvements
intercom.com
- Match your Messenger font to your brand
intercom.com
- Flexible Snooze Options
intercom.com
- Follow Conversations and Tickets
intercom.com
- Turn any Inbox search into a View in one click
intercom.com