# Freshdesk Alternative for Shopify: Per-Seat + Metered AI

> Freshdesk bills a per-agent seat, billed annually, then Freddy AI in $49 packs of 100 sessions on top. Arbyn is $99/mo flat, unlimited, on Shopify.

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

## How Freshdesk charges

Per agent seat, plus $49 per 100 AI sessions. Two meters on one invoice. A per-agent seat licence: Growth $23 per agent per month billed monthly and $19 billed annually, Pro $66 and $55, Enterprise $107 and $89. Then Freddy AI is bought on top, in packs, at $49 per 100 AI sessions. A session is a 72-hour email window, not a reply. The 500 included sessions are once per account, ever, not a monthly allowance. Freddy AI Copilot is a second per-seat charge at $35 per agent per month billed monthly, $29 billed annually. Chat, social and AI Agent Studio need Freshdesk Omni, a separate product with its own price list.

The seat licence runs $19 to $107 per agent per month. Freddy AI is bought separately, in packs, at $49 per 100 sessions, and the 500 they include are once per account, ever. We will start with the part that does not flatter us: for a small team that wants human ticketing and no AI, Freshdesk is genuinely cheaper than Arbyn, and we say so plainly below.

## Where Freshdesk beats Arbyn

- They are cheaper than us for a small team that does not want AI. Their rate: Growth is $23 per agent per month billed monthly, $19 billed annually. Our arithmetic: four people billed monthly is $92, five people billed annually is $95, both under Arbyn's $99. If ticketing for a handful of people is all you need, buy Freshdesk.
- They are a mature, deep help desk and Arbyn is not trying to be one. SLAs, routing, skills-based assignment, approval workflows, audit logs, custom objects, custom reporting, a customer portal, a knowledge base and 5,000 collaborators are all on their pricing table. Arbyn has none of that ticketing machinery.
- They cover far more channels than we do today. Through Freshdesk Omni and Freshcaller you get WhatsApp, social and voice. Arbyn is live on support email and on-site chat, SMS is on our roadmap, and Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp are still to come.

Freshworks is a large public company that claims "Trusted by 74,000+ Businesses Worldwide" on its own pricing page, and if procurement scoring decides this, that matters and we cannot match it. Their on-ramp is real too: $0 for one to two agents for six months, with 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions included so you can test the AI before you pay for it (Pro and Enterprise on Freshdesk; Growth, Pro and Enterprise on Freshdesk Omni). AI Agent Studio is a no-code builder with an API Action block, so a team willing to do the build work can wire up actions Arbyn does not ship. Arbyn's action set is fixed at what we ship. Freddy AI Copilot is a proper assistant for your human agents, and Arbyn does not sell one.
One more thing in their favour, because the whole page falls apart if we shade it. A Freshdesk AI session is a 72-hour email window, or a 24-hour chat window on Omni, and every AI reply inside that window counts as a single session. That is a genuinely generous unit, and 200 sessions is not 200 replies. Do not let anyone, including us, tell you it is.
The disagreement is the shape of the bill. Freshdesk runs a seat licence and an AI pack meter at the same time, and the 500 sessions they include are a one-time grant for the life of the account, not a monthly allowance. Their words: "This is limited to once per account." Arbyn's $0 Starter carries 150 AI conversations every calendar month and resets on the 1st. Their 500 beats our 150 in month one and is overtaken during month four. After that it never comes back, and ours never runs out.

Stay with Freshdesk if you are running a real support floor that needs SLAs, routing and audit logs, if you need voice and WhatsApp today, or if you are a small human team who wants ticketing and no AI, where they are simply cheaper than us. Switch to Arbyn when the AI session packs have started deciding your bill, when you want the store owner's approval on money-moving actions to be built in rather than something you build at the API layer, and when you want the same agent to sell as well as serve.

## Where Arbyn wins

### One price. No seats, no packs.

Arbyn Agent is $99 a month at any volume: unlimited conversations, unlimited seats, nothing metered. There is no seat licence, no session pack to size before the month starts, and no second per-seat charge for a copilot. Arbyn Starter is $0 with 150 AI conversations every calendar month, resetting on the 1st.

_Freshdesk's 500 included AI sessions are once per account, ever. Their words: "We offer 500 sessions with Pro and Enterprise plans to try out Freddy AI agents. This is limited to once per account." Arbyn's 150 come back every month._

### Arbyn performs the action, and the approval cannot be skipped

Arbyn updates the shipping address on its own. Cancel an order, issue a refund, apply a discount so the checkout already has the code on it, send a gift card, reship, start a return: you approve with one click and then Arbyn performs the real Shopify mutation and confirms it to the customer, writing every action to the order timeline. That approval is a deliberate money control, not a missing feature. Arbyn does not edit orders or line items, and we say so.

_Freshdesk's own Actions Library doc says the approval gets skipped: "Because there is no live conversation, the workflow does not prompt for confirmation interactively - confirmation blocks are skipped for email agents", followed by "Ensure high-impact operations in email workflows have appropriate safeguards at the API layer." They are telling you to go build the money control yourself._

### Arbyn sells. Freddy serves.

Arbyn runs product quizzes, a bundle builder, discount offers, in-chat upsells, abandoned-cart recovery inside the chat, and it attributes revenue on every order it sources. All of it is live, and all of it is inside the same $99. Nothing on Freshdesk's pricing page or their Freddy AI Agent page mentions any of it. Their AI examples are all service-side.

_Freshworks does sell marketing, separately: Freshmarketer is on the Shopify App Store at $18 per month or $180 per year. That is email and SMS campaigns, not a live agent selling in the chat, and there is no revenue attribution back to a support conversation._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small team, no AI | 4 people on the help desk | $92/mo | $0. They win here. |
| Growing DTC | 500 AI sessions/mo | $443/mo | $344/mo |
| Scale / BFCM | 1,000 AI sessions/mo | $688/mo | $589/mo |

Source: [freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing](https://www.freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing/). Verified July 2026, read first-party on their own pages in the same session this was written. Seat licence, from the pricing page's own toggle data: Growth $23 per agent per month billed monthly and $19 billed annually, Pro $66 and $55, Enterprise $107 and $89. The page shows the annual number by default. Freddy AI Copilot: $35 billed monthly, $29 billed annually, per agent, a second per-seat charge stacked on the seat licence. The AI meter is quoted verbatim: "First 500 sessions included. $49 per 100 sessions", which is $0.49 a session, on top of the seat licence and not instead of it. The session definition is theirs: "an Email AI Agent session is defined as a 72-hour window starting from the customer's first email. All AI responses within that window count as a single session, regardless of the number of replies." The 500 are a one-time grant: "This is limited to once per account." Pack expiry is theirs: "The validity corresponds to your payment cycle." Freshdesk Omni is a separate product with its own price list (Growth $35 monthly / $29 annually, Pro $95 / $79, Enterprise $143 / $119) and the same AI meter. The scenario assumptions are ours: the number of people, the tier, and that the one-time 500 sessions are already spent. Every rate in them is theirs. Freshdesk has no Shopify App Store listing, so this page publishes no rating or review count for them, and Freshmarketer's is a different product's and is not borrowed here. 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.