# Crisp Alternative for Shopify: Unlimited AI Only on Their Top Plan

> Crisp's plan fee is flat, but AI runs on a separate credit balance, unlimited only on their top tier. Arbyn is $99/mo flat and unlimited, on Shopify.

Source: https://arbyn.app/compare/crisp

## How Crisp charges

Flat plan, plus a dollar meter for AI. $45, $95 or $295 a month per workspace, with $5, $25 or $75 of AI credits inside the plan. Crisp's own page translates those balances into around 90, 450 and 1,350 automated conversations a month, and their help center estimates a Hugo conversation at $0.05 to $0.10. The Free plan is $0 forever with, in their words, "No AI credits included", and Enterprise is a custom quote. No published plan includes unlimited AI.

Crisp's plan price is fixed, and at $45 it is genuinely low. The AI is not fixed: every plan carries a dollar balance of credits that the Hugo agent draws down per AI-handled conversation, so the AI half of the bill moves with how much your customers actually use it. Arbyn is $99 a month with unlimited AI conversations, and a $0 plan underneath it that includes 150 every calendar month.

## Where Crisp beats Arbyn

- They are cheaper than us at low AI volume, plainly. Mini is $45 a month and Essentials is $95, both under Arbyn Agent's $99. At 500 conversations a month our own arithmetic on their rates puts Crisp at $66 to $86. If your AI volume is small and your team fits the seat allowance, you pay less on Crisp.
- Twelve live channels today, including WhatsApp Business, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, SMS, Viber, Line, X and phone. Arbyn is support email and on-site live chat, with SMS on the roadmap and the social channels still coming. If you need WhatsApp or Instagram this week, Crisp has it and we do not.
- Their AI cannot silently run up a bill. Pay-as-you-go is off by default, and their help center says that when the credits run out Hugo "stops answering automatically" and new conversations go to your team until credits reset or you enable more. That is a real spend control, and we will say so.

Crisp is a wide, mature support platform and its pricing page is unusually clear about what it meters. A shared inbox, a knowledge base, CRM customer profiles, campaign sequences across email, SMS, chat and WhatsApp, and twelve live channels. It runs on WooCommerce and Stripe as well as Shopify, so it is not Shopify-only the way Arbyn is, and a technical team can extend the agent with custom MCP servers, which means their action set is not fixed the way ours is. Crisp also offers a custom-quote Enterprise tier with dedicated onboarding and a personalized SLA, and we have no equivalent. On the Shopify App Store they hold 4.1 out of 5 across 34 reviews. Arbyn is narrower on purpose: one agent, on Shopify, doing support and sales.
The disagreement is the meter, and it is not the plan price. Crisp's plan price is flat and low. What is not flat is the AI: each plan carries a dollar balance of credits, and the Hugo agent draws that balance down per AI-handled conversation. So the more work the AI does, the more the AI costs, and the two published escape routes are to top the balance up or to let Hugo stop answering. Arbyn has no balance. $99 a month, unlimited AI conversations, and a $0 Starter plan that includes 150 every calendar month while Crisp's Free plan includes, in their words, "No AI credits included".

Stay with Crisp if you need WhatsApp or Instagram today, if your AI volume is genuinely small, or if you want one inbox spanning Shopify, WooCommerce and Stripe. Switch to Arbyn when the AI is doing real work every day and you want one flat $99 that does not move with usage, and when you want the agent to cancel, refund, discount, send a gift card, reship and start returns as real Shopify actions the moment you approve them.

## Where Arbyn wins

### $99 is the whole bill

Arbyn Agent is $99 a month, flat, with unlimited AI conversations. There is no dollar balance to top up, no pay-as-you-go switch to leave on or off, and no month where the AI doing more work costs you more money. Below that, Arbyn Starter is $0 with 150 AI conversations every calendar month and full features.

_Crisp's help center: "Credits reset every billing cycle, currently on the 4th of the month." Arbyn's free cap resets on the 1st, and the Agent plan has no cap to reset._

### Arbyn does the Shopify work

Arbyn updates a shipping address on its own. It cancels an order, issues a refund, applies a discount so the checkout already has the code on it, sends a gift card, reships and starts a return: you approve with one click, and then Arbyn performs the real Shopify mutation and confirms it to the customer. That approval is a deliberate money control, not a missing feature. Arbyn does not edit orders or line items.

_Crisp's Shopify page documents order history in the inbox and refunds "straight from Crisp". Past that, cancels, discount codes, gift cards, reships and returns are not published, so you would wire them yourself through their MCP servers._

### It also sells

Product quizzes, a bundle builder, discount offers, in-chat upsells, abandoned-cart recovery inside the chat, and revenue attribution on every order it sources. All live, on the same $99, and on the $0 plan too.

_Crisp Campaigns is proactive outreach and retention across email, SMS, chat and WhatsApp. It publishes no product quiz, no bundle builder, no in-chat upsell and no revenue attribution._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo store | 500 conversations/mo | $66 to $86/mo | Crisp wins at this volume, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Arbyn Starter is $0 for 150 AI conversations a month. Above that, Arbyn Agent is $99. |
| Growing DTC | 1,000 conversations/mo | $91 to $136/mo | $0 to $37/mo |
| Scale / BFCM | 3,000 conversations/mo | $236 to $336/mo | $137 to $237/mo |

Source: [crisp.chat/pricing](https://crisp.chat/en/pricing/). Verified July 2026. The plan prices ($45, $95 and $295 a month per workspace, on the monthly toggle), the AI credits each plan includes ($5, $25 and $75), Crisp's own translation of those balances into around 90, 450 and 1,350 automated conversations a month, the seats (2, 4, 10 and 20), the $10 additional seat on Mini and Essentials, the customer-profile caps and the Free plan's "No AI credits included" are all quoted from Crisp's pricing page. The definition of a billed Hugo conversation, the $0.05 to $0.10 average that Crisp itself calls "only an estimate", the pay-as-you-go switch that is off by default, and the credit reset on the 4th of the month are from their Hugo billing document (help.crisp.chat). Crisp publishes no annual dollar price and no fixed overage rate, so this page prints neither. Every rate here is theirs. The arithmetic is ours: it assumes every conversation is AI-handled, pay-as-you-go turned on, seats inside the plan allowance, and the cheapest Crisp plan at each volume. Crisp's feature matrix does not clearly state which plan unlocks the AI Agent, so we price only from the published per-plan credit balances, which understates Crisp if the agent starts higher up. Verified against

## Pricing

- **Arbyn Starter** - $0/month, permanently free. 150 conversations / month. Resets 1st of each month.
- **Arbyn Agent** - $99/month flat, unlimited conversations. Or $990/year (2 months free, saves $198, 17% off).
- **There is no trial.** Billing starts immediately on the Agent plan. The free Starter plan is permanent.
- The conversation cap is the only difference between plans. There is no feature gating.

## Channels

Live today: **support email** and **on-site live chat**. That is the complete list.

SMS, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Voice are on the roadmap and are NOT live. Arbyn does not edit orders or change line items. Money-moving actions (cancel, refund, discount, gift card, reship, return) require the store owner's approval, and then Arbyn performs them. Running them fully autonomously is a beta authorization and is in development. Shipping address changes are already autonomous.

## What Arbyn does on a Shopify order

- **Change the shipping address**: Live. Arbyn does this on its own. Arbyn updates the shipping address on the Shopify order itself, inside the conversation, and writes the change to the order timeline.
- **Cancel an order**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn cancels the order. Anything that moves money waits for the store owner's approval. That is a deliberate control, not a missing feature. Once you approve, Arbyn fires Shopify's order cancellation itself and confirms it to the customer.
- **Issue a refund**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn issues the refund. Arbyn prepares the refund against the original payment method and sends it to you. On approval it files the refund in Shopify. You can cap the value it is allowed to prepare, per channel.
- **Apply a discount**: Live. Arbyn creates a real Shopify discount and applies it to the cart, handing the shopper a checkout with the code already on it. It can also issue a discount code on an order once you approve it.
- **Send a gift card, or reship an order**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn does it. Arbyn creates the gift card, or raises the replacement order, in Shopify once you approve.
- **Start a return**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn opens the return. Arbyn opens the return in Shopify on your approval.
- **Look up a gift card or store-credit balance**: Live. Arbyn does this on its own. "Do I have store credit left?" is a question most support tools answer with a human. Arbyn reads the balance itself, for a verified customer or from the code they give you, and reports the masked card, the balance and the expiry. If there is no card, it says so rather than guessing.
- **Handle a subscription question**: Live. You choose what it does. Arbyn knows which of your products are sold as a subscription, shows that on the product card in the conversation, and sends a subscriber to their subscription management page to pause, skip or cancel. It answers how your subscriptions work from your own knowledge, but it does not read an individual customer's contract, so it will not state their renewal date or status. Most cancels are a customer with product piling up, and the fix is getting them to the page where they can slow the cadence down. Reading the contract itself is on the roadmap.
- **Answer support email and live chat**: Live. Arbyn reads every inbound support email and every chat, works out the intent, pulls the live Shopify context, and replies in your brand voice.

Money-moving actions (cancel, refund, discount, gift card, reship, return) require the store owner's approval, and then Arbyn performs them. Running them fully autonomously is a beta authorization and is in development. Shipping address changes are already autonomous.