# Richpanel Alternative for Shopify: No Seats, No $200 AI Floor

> Richpanel bills $100 per seat plus a $200 monthly AI floor. Arbyn is $0 to start, then $99/month flat, unlimited, no seats, no AI meter, for Shopify.

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

## How Richpanel charges

Per seat, plus per AI conversation. Two meters on richpanel.com/pricing: $100 per helpdesk seat per month for your human team, plus about $0.20 per AI-handled conversation, which is the average Richpanel states across their customers and not a quoted rate, because it is billed on your actual token use. A $200 monthly minimum sits under the AI line and there are no plans or tiers. Their Shopify App Store listing sells something different again: seat tiers at PRO $89/mo, PRO MAX $119/mo and Self Service $119/mo. The two first-party sources disagree, so every figure here is quoted to the page it came from and none of them are blended.

The unit Richpanel bills for is the AI-handled conversation, so the better their AI works the more of your bill it becomes. Add $100 for every person on your team who uses the helpdesk, and a $200 monthly minimum underneath both. Arbyn is $99 a month, unlimited conversations, no seat fee, no minimum, with a $0 plan under it.

## Where Richpanel beats Arbyn

- Channels. Their hero is "Every channel: email, chat, social, SMS, WhatsApp, voice" and their FAQ adds marketplaces. Arbyn is support email and on-site live chat, SMS is on our roadmap, and Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and voice are still to come. This is their clearest win over us and we are not going to dress it up.
- Security and compliance posture we do not claim parity with: SOC 2 Type II audited annually, third-party audited HIPAA, GDPR audited and EU-ready, AES-256 at rest with TLS in transit, 99.9% uptime on AWS across three availability zones, annual third-party penetration tests, SAML SSO, 2FA and RBAC.
- A track record and a commitment behind it. They say they power support for 3,000+ businesses since 2020, they carry 4.8 stars from 129 Shopify App Store reviews, and they publish this: "If it doesn't resolve at least 50% of conversations autonomously in 30 days, we refund every dollar. No proration."

Richpanel's pricing page is more honest than most in this category, and some of the things people assume about usage billing are not true here. There is no overage rate and no automatic surcharge: when you hit your monthly volume, conversations go to your human team, and extra AI capacity is an opt-in $100 block you choose to buy. Unused volume rolls for 15 days on monthly billing and 90 days on yearly. They also tell you where they do not fit, in their own words: it pays off best above about three agents or 2,000 conversations a month, and below that they suggest you book a call first. That is a straighter answer than most pricing pages give.
They also let you decide, action by action, what the AI may do without a person. Refunds and cancellations can be signed off by a human, or you can turn them loose. We have made a different call and we will defend it rather than hide it: on Arbyn, money-moving actions wait for your one-click approval, and then Arbyn performs the real Shopify mutation and confirms it to the customer. That is a money control, not a missing feature. Shipping address changes run on their own. Full autonomy on the money-moving actions is a beta authorization we are still building.
So the disagreement is not about whether Richpanel is a serious product. It is about the shape of the bill. Their model puts a $200 floor under a quiet month, charges $100 for every person on your team who opens the helpdesk, and then charges again for the thing you actually want, which is the AI handling the conversation. Arbyn charges $99 a month, flat, at any volume, with no seat fee and no minimum, and $0 for your first 150 AI conversations every calendar month.

Stay with Richpanel if you need voice, WhatsApp, social and marketplaces live today, or you are running a support floor of several people who need SOC 2 and HIPAA on the paperwork. Switch to Arbyn when your volume is under their 2,000-conversation sweet spot, or when you are done paying a seat fee and an AI fee and a monthly minimum to answer the same conversation once.

_2020_

## Where Arbyn wins

### $99 is the whole bill

No seat fee, no per-conversation fee, no monthly minimum, no capacity blocks to buy. Arbyn Agent is $99 a month at any volume, and Arbyn Starter is $0 with 150 AI conversations every calendar month on full features.

_Richpanel's own FAQ describes a common starting setup, one AI agent plus one seat, as about $300 a month. That is three times our flat price before your volume has done anything._

### Your team is not a line item

Add a second person, a seasonal helper, an agency, a co-founder. Arbyn does not care and the price does not move. Richpanel's page is explicit: "Each person on your team who uses the helpdesk is $100 a month."

_Three seats on their model is $300 a month before a single AI conversation, and $300 is also the point where they say the model starts paying off._

### The AI conversation is free, not the meter

Arbyn handles unlimited conversations on the $99 plan. Richpanel bills about $0.20 for each AI-handled conversation, on their own stated average, so every conversation their AI takes off your team's hands is a conversation that lands on your invoice instead.

_Their AI line is billed on actual token use and the model you pick, so $0.20 is an average across all their customers, not a rate you were quoted. A complex month costs more than a simple one._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo store | 500 AI-handled conversations/mo | $300/mo | $201/mo |
| Growing DTC | 2,000 AI-handled conversations/mo | $500/mo | $401/mo |
| Scale / BFCM | 5,000 AI-handled conversations/mo | $1,100/mo | $1,001/mo |

Source: [richpanel.com/pricing](https://richpanel.com/pricing). Verified July 2026, and read on their pages in the same session this was written. The usage model is quoted from richpanel.com/pricing: "For your human team. $100/seat per month", "~$0.20 per AI handled conversation. Billed on your actual token use and the LLM model you choose... The average is $0.20 across all customers", a $200 monthly minimum, "No plans or tiers to pick", and "A common starting setup, one AI agent plus one seat, is about $300 a month." Because $0.20 is their stated average rather than a contracted rate, every scenario above labels it as such. The scenario assumptions are ours: one helpdesk seat, and every conversation handled by the AI. The rates are theirs. Their Shopify App Store listing publishes a different, seat-tier model (PRO $89/mo, PRO MAX $119/mo, Self Service $119/mo, from $89/month, 4.8 stars from 129 reviews), and Richpanel never reconciles the two, so nothing on this page merges or averages them. We publish no migration timeline, because their own pages give two different ones. Usage model 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.