Gorgias vs Arbyn: Per-Resolution vs Flat-Rate Shopify Support Pricing

Gorgias vs Arbyn is the comparison that comes up most often, since Gorgias is the most established AI support tool built specifically for Shopify stores, and its pricing structure is the clearest example of what per-resolution billing actually costs at scale. Gorgias built much of what the current Shopify support-app category still assumes as baseline: deep order visibility, ticket automation, and years of App Store credibility most newer entrants haven't had time to accumulate. None of that changes what its specific billing structure charges a store as volume grows, which is the part most Gorgias vs Arbyn searches are actually trying to understand.

Gorgias built the category. That's not nothing. But building the category first doesn't mean the pricing model built alongside it was ever the right one.

What Gorgias Actually Charges

Gorgias runs four base plans: Starter at 10 dollars a month, Basic at 60, Pro at 360, and Advanced at 900 dollars a month, with its AI Agent billed as a separate automation fee of roughly 0.90 to 1.00 dollars per AI-resolved conversation on top of whichever base plan a store is on. The structure that catches most stores off guard is that an AI-resolved ticket counts twice: once against the base plan's ticket allotment, once as the separate automation fee. A store on the 360-dollar Pro plan resolving 1,000 conversations a month through the AI agent pays roughly 1,260 dollars a month before any overage, since the automation fee alone adds close to 900 dollars on top of the base plan. Overage interactions above a store's bundled allotment jump to 1.50 dollars each, a premium most stores don't notice until the invoice arrives.

The base plan tiers themselves are worth understanding precisely, since the jump between them is steep enough to matter on its own, independent of the automation fee. Starter at 10 dollars covers a genuinely small ticket allotment suited to a brand-new store. Basic at 60 dollars and Pro at 360 dollars represent a 6x jump, and Pro to Advanced at 900 dollars is another 2.5x jump. A store growing past one tier's ticket allotment isn't just adding the automation fee on top, it's also potentially absorbing one of these base-plan jumps at the same time, which compounds the per-resolution cost described above rather than replacing it.

Gorgias has claimed automation rates up to 60 percent in its own marketing, a real and meaningful number, but one that under this billing model means a higher bill, not a lower one, since more automated resolutions is exactly what the per-resolution fee is metering. A Gorgias App Store review cited in multiple 2026 pricing breakdowns describes a brand on the Advanced plan paying roughly 13,500 dollars a year in base fees and getting hit with an additional 14,000 dollars in AI overages, effectively doubling their annual spend the moment the AI agent started resolving at the rate it was designed to. This is not a story about a badly run implementation. It's the structural outcome of a pricing model that charges more precisely when the AI performs as advertised.

What Arbyn Charges

Arbyn runs two flat plans with no per-resolution component. Arbyn Starter is 0 dollars a month for 150 AI conversations, full features, no gating. Arbyn Agent is 99 dollars a month flat for unlimited conversations, no per-resolution fee, no automation add-on, and no annual contract. Billing starts immediately when a store selects Arbyn Agent, and the free Starter plan never expires. The first 50 lifetime conversations on any new install are a calibration window, and those don't count against Starter's monthly cap.

The Feature Gap Nobody Expects: Gorgias Has No Built-In Chatbot

This is worth stating plainly since it surprises most people comparing the two: despite pricing that reaches 900 dollars a month at its Advanced tier, Gorgias has no built-in chatbot feature at all, according to multiple reviews cited across 2026 comparison guides. Its "AI Agent" automation runs on top of a ticketing and helpdesk architecture rather than a conversational chat-first design, which is a genuinely different product shape than a chat-native tool. Gorgias reviews also cite a steep learning curve and, separately, unpredictable spam filters that can filter out real customer messages, alongside some reported friction managing subscriptions.

Gorgias does offer genuine, deep Shopify order management directly inside a conversation, viewing, editing, and canceling orders without leaving the chat, which is a real action-taking capability beyond pure ticket resolution. This is a meaningful advantage worth naming honestly: Gorgias's order-editing capability is more mature and more established than Arbyn's narrower, newer address-update capability specifically, since Gorgias has had years to build out that order-management depth.

Channel Coverage Compared

Gorgias centralizes email, chat, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and social comments and DMs into a single feed, a genuinely broad omnichannel setup built up over years of integration work. This breadth is a real, structural advantage for a store whose customers reach out across many different surfaces and expects one team, or one AI layer, to see all of it in a unified view rather than juggling separate tools per channel. Arbyn currently covers email and live chat, not Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, SMS, or voice, a real gap worth naming directly for a store with meaningful volume across those other channels.

A store whose support conversations are concentrated in email and chat specifically won't feel this gap; a store fielding a significant share of its volume through social DMs or SMS needs that covered somewhere in its stack regardless of which tool handles the core conversation, whether that means staying with Gorgias's broader coverage, running a separate tool alongside Arbyn for those specific channels, or accepting that those channels get handled manually until Arbyn's own channel coverage expands. None of these is automatically the wrong answer, but a store should make that choice deliberately rather than discover the gap after switching.

Sales Capability: Where the Design Premise Actually Differs

Gorgias markets itself as a "conversational AI platform for ecommerce that drives sales and resolves support inquiries," and its feature set does include product recommendations and order visibility that can support a sales motion. In practice, its review base and its billing structure both describe a support-first tool: the per-resolution fee rewards fast ticket closure, not a longer, more exploratory conversation that ends in a recommended add-on, since the fee is identical either way and a quick close costs Gorgias less to deliver against its own automation costs.

Arbyn is built around the reverse premise: every conversation carries revenue attribution by default, with proactive triggers and product recommendations surfacing inside the same conversation handling the support question, using the store's live catalog data. Neither design is wrong in the abstract, they're optimized for different outcomes, and a store should pick based on which conversation shape actually matches how it wants support to function, not on which vendor's marketing copy uses the word "sales" more prominently.

Setup, Reviews, and Track Record

Gorgias carries the deeper track record in this comparison by a wide margin: years of Shopify-specific integration development, a large existing review base across the App Store, and enough accumulated deployment experience to have well-documented common failure modes, the spam filter issue and the ticketing hiccups mentioned in its own reviews, that a store can research before signing up. This maturity is a genuine asset for a store that wants to see exactly what it's getting into before committing.

Arbyn's shorter track record cuts the other way: less accumulated review data to research, but also a narrower, more recently built product without years of legacy architecture decisions baked in. A store weighing setup risk should weigh Gorgias's proven, if imperfect, track record against Arbyn's newer, unproven-at-scale but more tightly focused design, rather than assuming either direction is automatically the safer choice.

What a Store Should Actually Check Before Choosing

The same discipline that applies to any vendor comparison in this category applies here: pull the last 90 days of actual conversation volume, calculate what that volume costs under Gorgias's exact structure, the appropriate base plan tier plus the automation fee at 0.90 to 1.00 dollars per resolution, and compare that real number against Arbyn's flat 99 dollars or free Starter tier. For a store already past a few hundred monthly conversations, this calculation resolves in favor of the flat-rate side quickly, though Gorgias's deeper channel coverage, more mature order-management features, and longer track record are real factors that should weigh into the decision alongside the raw cost difference, not be dismissed in favor of the cheaper number alone.

Beyond the pricing calculation, a store should specifically verify a handful of things directly with Gorgias before signing a contract, rather than relying on the advertised rate card alone. First, confirm whether the current per-resolution rate is still 0.90 to 1.00 dollars, since per-resolution rates in this category have moved before and can move again without much notice. Second, ask specifically what triggers a base-plan tier upgrade, since crossing a ticket allotment mid-month during a busy season is a different experience than a planned, deliberate upgrade decision. Third, ask directly about the reported spam filter issue and how it's been addressed in the current product version, since a false positive on a filter that blocks real customer messages is a serious failure mode for any support tool, not a minor inconvenience. Fourth, if channel breadth beyond email and chat specifically matters to the store, verify that each additional channel a vendor advertises is genuinely AI-handled rather than merely present as a checkbox on a feature list.

A store currently on Gorgias considering a switch should also weigh migration cost honestly: existing macros, canned responses, and ticket history don't transfer automatically to a different platform, which means a switch has a real setup cost even when the ongoing pricing case is clear. For a store with years of Gorgias-specific workflow investment, that migration cost may reasonably offset some of the pricing advantage a flat-rate alternative offers, at least in the near term, which is worth weighing honestly rather than dismissed in favor of the pricing math alone.

What Store Owners Actually Report Paying

The gap between advertised rate and real invoice shows up in how store owners describe their Gorgias bills after the fact. A Reddit thread in r/dropshipping from May 2026 describes a store running about 800 conversations a month reporting a bill close to 400 dollars once AI resolution fees were added on top of the base plan, after switching from a different tool specifically to reduce cost and finding the new bill wasn't meaningfully smaller. The same thread summarized the pattern directly: the advertised base price is usually meaningless once ticket volume actually grows, since the number on the pricing page describes the plan a store starts on, not the plan its actual usage puts it on within a few months. None of these are stores that made a mistake. Their AI worked, their support volume grew the way a healthy store's volume is supposed to grow, and their bill grew in exact proportion, which is the structural outcome the pricing model was always going to produce.

Why the Incentive Structure Matters as Much as the Dollar Figures

The deeper issue with Gorgias's pricing isn't any single dollar amount, it's what the model incentivizes. A tool billed per resolution makes more money as it resolves more conversations, which sounds aligned with a store's interest until you notice the vendor has no financial incentive to help a store need fewer resolutions overall, since fewer resolutions directly reduces the vendor's own revenue from that account. A flat-rate tool has no such conflict: since the fee doesn't change with usage, the vendor's only path to growing revenue is keeping stores subscribed and satisfied, which ties success to actual outcomes rather than raw resolution volume. This is not a claim that Gorgias behaves badly because of this structure. It's a structural observation about what the pricing model rewards, independent of the company's intentions, and it's the same distinction that applies to every per-resolution billed tool covered elsewhere on this blog.

The Real Math at Different Volumes

At 500 monthly conversations, Gorgias's automation fee alone runs roughly 450 dollars, on top of whichever base plan tier that volume requires, typically Basic or Pro. Arbyn Agent at the same volume is 99 dollars flat. At 1,000 conversations, Gorgias's automation fee reaches roughly 900 to 1,000 dollars before the base plan, against Arbyn's unchanged 99 dollars. At 2,000 conversations, a volume that pushes many stores onto Gorgias's Advanced plan at 900 dollars a month, the automation fee alone can reach 1,800 to 2,000 dollars, meaning total Gorgias cost at that volume can exceed 2,700 dollars a month, against Arbyn's flat 99. At 5,000 conversations, a genuinely busy month for an established store, Gorgias's automation fee alone can approach 4,500 to 5,000 dollars, before the Advanced plan's 900-dollar base cost is even added, putting realistic total cost near 5,500 to 6,000 dollars against Arbyn's unchanged 99.

The seasonal case deserves specific mention, since it's where this gap widens most sharply. A store's November and December conversation volume typically runs several times higher than a normal month. Under Gorgias's per-resolution structure, that spike bills at full rate, turning the busiest and most revenue-critical weeks of the year into the most expensive weeks for support tooling as well, and potentially forcing a mid-season upgrade to a higher base plan tier if ticket volume crosses that tier's allotment during the spike specifically. Under Arbyn Agent's flat structure, the same volume spike costs the same 99 dollars it costs in a quiet month, removing the seasonal pricing risk from the equation entirely rather than requiring a separate calculation for peak season.

Where This Points

For a store that has run this math against its own real conversation volume, Arbyn is built around the flat side of this specific comparison: unlimited conversations at 99 dollars, or free up to 150 a month, with no automation fee to watch climb as the AI resolves more. The honest gap worth naming is Gorgias's deeper order-management maturity and its years of Shopify-specific integration work, real advantages for a store that needs that depth today. The Gorgias vs Arbyn comparison that actually settles anything is the one run against a specific store's own volume, not the one comparing feature lists in the abstract, and for most stores past a few hundred monthly conversations, the flat-rate side of that math wins clearly.

The broader takeaway from running Gorgias vs Arbyn through actual numbers applies to any established, deeply featured incumbent compared against a newer, narrower challenger in this category: years of integration depth and channel breadth are real, valuable things a store should weigh honestly, and none of that changes what a specific volume of conversations actually costs under each vendor's real billing structure. Both facts can be true at once, and a store choosing based on only one of them is making an incomplete decision either way.