# Tidio Alternative for Shopify: No AI Meter Stacked on Top

> Tidio bills conversations, Lyro AI, and Flows as three separate meters. Arbyn is $0 to start, then $99/month flat, unlimited, no AI add-on, for Shopify.

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

## How Tidio charges

Three stacked quotas, hard stop. Tidio meters three things separately and stacks them on one invoice. Human conversations: $0 for 50 (Free), $29 for 100 (Starter), then Growth from $59 for 250 up to $349 for 2,000. Lyro AI conversations are a separate pack, $39 for 50 a month up to $700 for 1,000, with anything above 1,000 sold as a custom subscription. Flows visitors reached is a third quota, from $29. There is no overage rate. Run a quota out and Tidio stops you until you upgrade or the month resets.

Human conversations, Lyro AI conversations and Flows visitors are three separate quotas that stack on one bill. There is nothing to absorb a busy month, because there is no overage rate. Tidio's own help center says that at the limit you "will no longer be able to respond to incoming messages, nor see their details."

## Where Tidio beats Arbyn

- Channels that ship today and ours do not. Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp all handle conversations on Tidio, and live video calls are checkmarked on all five plans, including the free one. Arbyn is support email and live chat, SMS is on our roadmap, and we have no video channel at all.
- Their free plan carries a real store, and it is free where ours is not. Tidio's $0 plan gives you 50 human conversations a month across 10 seats. Arbyn's $0 Starter meters AI conversations instead. A small store that just wants a human live chat widget can genuinely run Tidio for nothing, and 4.7 stars across 1,285 Shopify App Store reviews suggests plenty of them do.
- Lyro is more extensible than Arbyn. Their Smart Actions page says Lyro can update addresses, log new leads and trigger refunds through secure APIs, built in a visual builder "without writing a single line of code", with Model Context Protocol support: connect it once to your CRM, billing platform or database and it can use every tool that system exposes. Lyro Connect even lets Lyro sit on top of an existing help desk, on Plus and Premium. Arbyn does none of that.

Tidio is a real product with a real track record, and there are things on their page that are not on ours. They are on more channels than we are. They have live video calls on every plan including the free one. Their Smart Actions builder is genuinely more extensible than Arbyn, and Lyro Connect can bolt their AI onto a help desk you already run. Seats are not the meter at Tidio either, and we are not going to pretend they are: 10 seats on Free, Starter and Growth, custom above that. That is parity with Arbyn, not a weakness. Every paid plan also carries a 7-day no-charge period before billing starts.
The disagreement is the model. Tidio bills you on three quotas at once, and they are explicitly separate: their help center says "the conversations limit affects only person-to-person communication; flows (automated messages), Lyro (the AI agent), and Campaign (email marketing) quotas are entirely separate." That is three counters to watch in one month, and any of them can be the one that empties first. When one does, there is no overage line to absorb it. There is a banner at 80% and a stop at 100%. Arbyn has one number, $99, and it does not move.

Stay with Tidio if Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are the job you are hiring for today, if you want live video in the chat, or if your store is small enough to live inside 50 human conversations a month for $0. Switch to Arbyn when you are tired of sizing three quota packs before the month starts, when a hard stop in the middle of a busy week is not something you can absorb, and when you want the AI to take the real Shopify order action and tell you plainly who has to approve it.

## Where Arbyn wins

### One quota, not three

Arbyn is $99 a month, flat: unlimited conversations, unlimited AI resolutions, no separate AI pack to size and no third meter for automations. There is nothing to forecast, because there is nothing that moves.

_Tidio's AI agent page advertises "Pay just $0.5 per conversation". Their own published packs work out to $0.78 a conversation at the 50-pack and $0.70 at the 1,000-pack, by our division of their prices. No published pack hits $0.50._

### No hard stop, ever

Arbyn does not stop answering. There is no quota that empties, no banner at 80%, and no month where the tool goes quiet because a counter ran out. On the $0 Starter plan you get 150 AI conversations every calendar month, and it resets on the 1st. On Agent it is unlimited.

_Tidio's help center, at 100% of the conversations quota: "If you do reach the limit at any point, however, you will no longer be able to respond to incoming messages, nor see their details." You upgrade, or you wait for the reset._

### Arbyn performs the action, and publishes who approves it

Arbyn updates the shipping address on its own. Cancel an order, issue a refund, apply a discount, 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. Arbyn does not edit orders or line items, and we say so.

_Tidio's Smart Actions page says Lyro can "trigger refunds". No Tidio page we read states whether a refund fires with or without your sign-off. We are not going to guess at their model. We published ours._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo store | 500 conversations/mo | $350/mo | $251/mo |
| Growing DTC | 1,250 conversations/mo | $759/mo | $660/mo |
| Scale | 2,000 conversations/mo | $349/mo + custom Lyro | $250+/mo |

Source: [tidio.com/pricing](https://www.tidio.com/pricing/). Verified July 2026, and every price here is the MONTHLY rate, read step by step off Tidio's own cost calculator with the Monthly toggle clicked. Check it yourself and click Monthly first: the page loads with Annually preselected, so a cold visit shows $24.17, $49.17 and $32.50 instead. Lyro AI packs: 50 = $39, 100 = $75, 150 = $110, 200 = $140, 300 = $210, 500 = $350, 750 = $525, 1,000 = $700, and above 1,000 is a custom subscription. Billable conversations: 50 = $0 (Free), 100 = $29 (Starter), then Growth at 250 = $59, 400 = $89, 600 = $129, 1,000 = $179, 2,000 = $349. The per-conversation figures ($0.78 at the entry pack, $0.70 at the top pack) are OUR division of THEIR published prices, not a rate Tidio publishes anywhere. Tidio's own AI agent page advertises "Pay just $0.5 per conversation", and no published pack matches it, so we quote that only as their claim. The 15-minute thread rule, the three separate quotas and the hard stop at 100% are quoted from Tidio's help center. 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.