# Help Scout Alternative for Shopify: $25/Seat + AI Fees

> Help Scout charges $25-$75 per user, plus $0.75 per AI resolution. For Shopify store owners, Arbyn is one flat $99/mo for unlimited AI support.

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

## How Help Scout charges

Per seat, plus $0.75 per AI resolution. Help Scout meters two things at once. Seats: $25, $45 or $75 per user per month on annual billing, or $30, $54 and $90 on monthly, with Pro published as 'Unlimited (minimum 10)' users. AI: $0.75 for every conversation AI Answers resolves on its own, sold as an add-on with no included allowance and billed in arrears. You can set a monthly resolution cap, and hitting it switches AI Answers off for the rest of the cycle. Their Free plan is a real $0 for 5 users, 1 Inbox and 1 Docs site, capped at 100 contacts a month. At light AI volume they cost less than Arbyn, and we say so on the page.

Help Scout is a serious shared inbox, and at light AI volume it is genuinely cheaper than we are: one seat on annual Standard stays under $99 all the way to about 98 AI resolutions a month. The model turns as soon as their AI starts working, because the thing you are paying for is the AI doing its job. The only lever that bounds that line is a cap that switches AI Answers off for the rest of the month.

## Where Help Scout beats Arbyn

- Help Scout is genuinely cheaper than Arbyn for a small team with light AI volume, and we are going to say it plainly rather than bury it. One seat on annual Standard is $25 a month, and at $0.75 a resolution you stay under our $99 all the way to about 98 AI resolutions. If you are a one-person store doing light AI volume, buy Help Scout.
- They cap the AI bill if you want them to, and a quiet month with them costs almost nothing. You can set a monthly cap on AI resolutions, and they market it as predictable billing. Twenty resolutions in January is $15 on their AI meter. Flat pricing only wins once the volume shows up, and we are not going to claim they have no cost control.
- They edit and duplicate Shopify orders from the sidebar, and Arbyn does not edit orders or line items at all. Help Scout is also a shared inbox built over more than a decade: collision detection, saved replies, SLA policies, workflows, light users, and HIPAA and SSO/SAML on Pro. If you have six people living in a queue all day, that is the product they sell and we are not trying to be it.

Help Scout's pricing page is clearer than most in this category, and two of the attacks we could have run at them are simply false. There is no runaway AI bill: you can set a monthly resolution cap and they publish it on the same page as the rate. And their meter is narrower than a raw conversation count, in a way that works in your favour. Their FAQ: 'A resolution is counted only if the customer receives an AI response and doesn't use escalation, search the knowledge base, ask more questions, or indicate that they need more help.' A conversation their AI half-answers does not bill. New accounts also get three months of unlimited AI Answers resolutions at no charge, starting the day the account is created.
So the disagreement is not that their bill is unbounded. It is what the bill is a function of. Help Scout's price moves with how many people you hire and how well their AI works, which means the better their AI gets, the more of your invoice it becomes. And the one lever that bounds it is a cap that switches AI Answers off for the rest of the cycle, so past the cap your customers stop getting AI answers until the 1st. Arbyn is $99 whatever happens: unlimited conversations, unlimited AI resolutions, no seat fee, no minimum, nothing billed in arrears, and $0 for your first 150 AI conversations every calendar month.

Stay with Help Scout if you are running a support floor of several people who live in a shared inbox all day, if you need HIPAA or SAML on the paperwork, or if your AI volume is light enough that a $25 seat and a handful of $0.75 resolutions comes in under $99. Switch to Arbyn when your AI volume has started deciding your bill, when a cap that turns the AI off mid-month is not something you can absorb, and when you want the agent to perform the real Shopify action in the thread instead of handing the ticket to a person.

## Where Arbyn wins

### One bill, and no counter

Arbyn Agent is $99 a month at any volume: unlimited conversations, unlimited AI resolutions, no seat fee, no minimum, nothing billed after the fact. Add a second person, a seasonal helper, an agency, a co-founder, and the price does not move. Arbyn Starter is $0 with 150 AI conversations every calendar month on full features.

_Help Scout's Pro plan is 'Unlimited (minimum 10)' users, which is a floor of $750 a month on annual billing or $900 on monthly before AI Answers has resolved a single conversation. The seat rates are theirs. The multiplication is ours. And their cost control works by switching the AI off: their FAQ says that if you hit your cap, 'AI Answers will be disabled automatically for the remainder of the monthly cycle.'_

### Arbyn performs the Shopify action

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.

_Help Scout's Shopify sidebar is real, and a human clicks it while reading the ticket. Their AI does not act: AI Answers 'gets all of its information to help your visitors from the knowledge sources you add to the agent', and their pricing page promises 'No dead ends. Your team is always a click away for more complex asks.' Their sidebar can also edit and duplicate an order, which Arbyn cannot do at all._

### Arbyn sells, not just answers

Product quizzes, a bundle builder, discount offers, in-chat upsells, abandoned-cart recovery inside the chat, with revenue attribution on every order Arbyn sources. All live, on the same $99, with no second product to buy and no extra meter attached to any of it.

_Help Scout's ecommerce page has no sales agent on it. The one revenue-adjacent feature is proactive messaging, in their words: 'Use in-app or on-site messages to promote sales, guide shoppers through checkout, recommend products, or even collect surveys and feedback.' That is a rules-based message you configure, not an agent that sells._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo store | 60 AI resolutions/mo | $70/mo | Help Scout wins this one. Buy Help Scout. |
| Growing DTC | 500 AI resolutions/mo | $425/mo | $326/mo |
| Scale / BFCM | 1,000 AI resolutions/mo | $825/mo | $726/mo |

Source: [helpscout.com/pricing](https://www.helpscout.com/pricing/). Verified July 2026, read first-party in the same session this was written. From helpscout.com/pricing: seat prices on annual billing ($25 / $45 / $75 per user per month, behind a Monthly/Annual toggle that loads on Annual with a '-16%' badge), user limits ('Up to 25', 'Up to 50', 'Unlimited (minimum 10)'), the Free plan (5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site, Contacts at '100/mo' against 'Unlimited' on the paid plans), the AI Answers add-on rate ('$0.75/resolution', 'Pay per resolution on a monthly basis'), the 'Pre-paid discounts available' line, the definition of the meter ('A resolution is a single conversation that is resolved by AI Answers without human assistance') and its escalation carve-out, the monthly cap ('If you hit your spending cap, AI Answers will be disabled automatically for the remainder of the monthly cycle'), the add-on Inbox and Docs prices, and the SMS and phone rows marked 'Via integration'. Monthly seat prices ($30 / $54 / $90) are from their Shopify App Store listing, which also shows 4.6 stars from 18 reviews. Billing in arrears is from docs.helpscout.com/article/1746-ai-resolutions-pricing. The Shopify sidebar verbs (refund, cancel, edit, duplicate) are from docs.helpscout.com/article/294-shopify. Seat counts and resolution volumes in the scenarios are OUR assumptions and the arithmetic is OURS; every rate is theirs, and every scenario uses their cheaper annual seat rate, so each one understates them. 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.