# Gorgias Alternative for Shopify: No Per-AI-Resolution Fees

> Stop paying per AI resolution. Gorgias's metered AI bills add up. Get unlimited AI support conversations for a flat $99/mo, or start free with 150/mo.

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

## How Gorgias charges

Per ticket, plus AI fee. $10 to $900/mo helpdesk-only by ticket volume, plus $0.36 to $0.40 overage per ticket and a separate $1.50 fee per automated interaction past your AI allowance. Gorgias now headlines a bundled Helpdesk + AI Agent price on top of that, which moves with an automation-rate slider on their own page.

Gorgias is the Shopify support standard, and it is honest about how it charges: you pay for each ticket your helpdesk replies to, and you pay again when AI Agent resolves a conversation on its own. Both meters climb with your volume.

## Where Gorgias beats Arbyn

- Integration breadth: 250+ apps in their library on every tier, far more than Arbyn today.
- Voice and SMS as first-class channels. Arbyn does not do voice at all, and SMS is on our roadmap, not live.
- A decade inside the Shopify ecosystem, with the enterprise tooling and track record that comes with it: 4.2 stars from roughly 660 Shopify App Store reviews.

Gorgias has been building for Shopify stores since 2015, and it shows. Their integration library, their voice and SMS infrastructure, and their enterprise tooling are genuinely more mature than ours. Their pricing page is also unusually candid about what it meters, which is more than most of this category manages.
If your stack already leans on Gorgias-native integrations you would have to rebuild, or if you need phone support today, moving to Arbyn means giving up things you currently have. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Switch to Arbyn anyway when: a predictable bill matters more than integration breadth, you want your AI resolutions to stop being a line item that grows, and you can live without voice for now.

## Where Arbyn wins

### One price, no meters

$99/mo flat, unlimited conversations, unlimited AI resolutions. Start on the $0 Starter plan with 150 AI conversations per calendar month and full features. December costs what June costs. There is no invoice waiting for you the morning after BFCM.

_Gorgias meters helpdesk tickets and bills a separate $1.50 fee per automated interaction past your included allowance. Their own billing documentation confirms a single conversation can count toward both meters, but only when AI Agent resolves it with no human handover. Accounts created before May 28, 2025 sit on legacy pricing where it counts toward one meter or the other, not both._

### Takes the action, in the conversation

Arbyn updates the shipping address on its own, and issues refunds and starts returns with your approval, natively inside the customer conversation, and writes every action to the Shopify order timeline so you can audit it. On every plan, including the $0 one.

_Gorgias sells AI Agent Actions (cancel, discount, apply) on its paid tiers and marks them unavailable on Starter, so the cheapest way in is the one without them._

### Live in minutes

Install from the Shopify App Store. Arbyn reads your orders, catalog, policies, and shipping zones automatically, and answers in your store's voice from the first conversation. No knowledge base to build, no services contract, no engineer.

_Gorgias' Starter tier is capped at 3 user seats, is monthly-billing only, and marks brand voice, guardrails and AI Agent Actions as unavailable. The features most stores are shopping for start one tier up._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo store | 500 tickets/mo | $320/mo | $221/mo |
| Growing DTC | 2,000 tickets/mo | $975/mo | $876/mo |
| BFCM / scale | 5,000 tickets/mo | $2,355/mo | $2,256/mo |

Source: [gorgias.com/pricing](https://www.gorgias.com/pricing). Verified July 2026. Ticket allowances (50 / 300 / 2,000 / 5,000), automated-interaction allowances (30 / 30 / 190 / 530, at the automation rate their page loads with), ticket overage ($0.40 on Starter and Basic, $0.36 on Pro and Advanced) and the $1.50 per automated interaction fee are all quoted from their four plan cards. Helpdesk-only list prices are from their Shopify App Store listing. On double-billing: Gorgias' own billing documentation (docs.gorgias.com, "What counts as a billable ticket or automated interaction") states one conversation can count toward both meters, but only when AI Agent resolves it without handing over to a human, and not at all for accounts created before May 28, 2025, which are on legacy pricing. Scenario cards assume AI Agent fully resolves 30% of tickets; that assumption is ours, every rate in them is theirs. Plan pricing 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.