Aide AI pricing 2026: $39 to $499 a month, billed per AI reply

TL;DR

Aide AI costs $0 to $499 a month on its self-serve plans: Free with 150 AI replies, Starter at $39 for 1,000, Pro at $149 for 4,000 and Scale at $499 for 15,000, per Aide's pricing page on 2026-10-27. Enterprise starts at $1,500 a month on an annual deal. Every plan has every feature, human replies are free, and there are no seat fees.

The unit is the AI reply: each customer message Aide answers or drafts for, sent or not, plus every Copilot draft for your team. Extra replies cost $0.15, $0.10 or $0.07 depending on plan, up to a monthly cap of $110, $350 or $1,000, and each cap lands on the price of the next plan up. Paying yearly takes about 20% off.

If you saw Aide quoted at $3,000 a month, that was true in May 2026 and is not anymore. And if your stack goes beyond Shopify plus Zendesk, Gorgias or Front, eesel's helpdesk teammate bills a whole ticket as one credit from $299 a month for 500, and SamCart runs it on Freshdesk tickets and website chat.

How much does Aide AI cost in 2026?

Aide sells five plans, priced by how many AI replies you need each month. The helpdesk itself is free, your team's replies are free, and paid plans include unlimited team members.

Every plan, Free included, gets the same product: Aide Helpdesk and Aide Chat, the AI agent answering from your products, policies and orders, Shopify order actions (cancel, refund, address change, returns), Copilot drafts, Gmail, and the Zendesk, Gorgias and Front connectors. Aide says plans differ only by replies, stores, branding, team members on Free and how much of their team you get.

The terms worth knowing before you click "Start trial", from the pricing FAQ:

• Free trial: 7 days on Starter, Pro and Scale, card on file. The trial gives you 25% of the plan's replies (250, 1,000 or 3,750).
• Changing plans: upgrades apply right away, downgrades and cancellations at the end of the billing period. Cancelling drops you to Free.
• Refunds: none for the rest of a paid period.
• Channels: chat, email and tickets inside Zendesk, Gorgias and Front. Voice and phone are not offered.

Why do older sources say Aide costs $3,000 a month?

Because until recently it did. I spend a lot of my week on what buyers actually search, and "Aide pricing" is a good example of a query where the answer changed faster than the results did.

A May 2026 snapshot of Aide's pricing page shows a completely different product. Growth was $3,000 a month, Scale $8,000 and Operations $15,000, all billed annually, with Enterprise "starting at $150,000/year." The page called them "plans built for outcomes, not seats", and every call to action went to a demo.

Now Aide's own fact sheet describes a free helpdesk where you pay for AI replies, and the pricing FAQ dates the every-feature-on-every-plan change to October 25, 2026. That is a drop from a $3,000 entry price to $39, and an Enterprise floor that went from $150,000 a year to $18,000 a year ($1,500 times 12).

So if an AI assistant, an old review or a colleague's spreadsheet tells you Aide is a $36,000-a-year commitment, it is out of date. The product moved from a managed partnership toward self-serve, which also changes who it is for. I come back to that below.

What counts as an AI reply in Aide pricing?

An AI reply is each customer message Aide wrote a reply or a draft for, sent or not, per Aide's billable unit definition. It is not a ticket, not a resolution and not a seat.

Here is Aide's own counting table, condensed:

Two things in that table matter more than they look.

Drafts count whether anyone sends them. That includes drafts while an inbox is in "Watch only", Aide's testing mode. I've watched what happens to drafts in real queues: in one real-traffic trial I helped run on a jewelry brand's Zendesk and Shopify inbox, about 1,000 tickets a month, agents sent only 12% of AI drafts as-is and rewrote the rest. Under Aide's unit, every one of those rewritten drafts is still a billed reply. That is fair, the AI did the work, but it means a draft-first rollout spends replies at the same rate as full automation.

It is per customer message, not per conversation. A shopper who writes "where's my order?", then "it says delivered but it's not here", then "ok, can you resend?" is 3 AI replies if Aide answers each. Short order tracking chats sit near 1 or 2. Returns and address changes, where the shopper verifies the order first, run longer.

It also helps to see where Aide's unit sits among the common models:

• Per AI reply (Aide): long back-and-forth threads cost more, and Copilot work for your team is metered too.
• Per ticket (eesel): one ticket is one credit, however many replies.
• Per resolution (Zendesk AI and Gorgias AI Agent): you pay when the AI closes the ticket. That is a form of outcome-based pricing.

What happens when you go over your included replies?

On Free, the AI stops at 150 replies and your team answers the rest of the month. On paid plans, Aide keeps answering and bills extra replies on your next invoice, but only up to a cap. At the cap the AI pauses and no customer message is dropped. Owners and admins get an email at 80% and 100% of the allowance.

The caps are the clever part of this pricing, and Aide says so in its FAQ: "Each cap is about the price of the next plan up." Run the numbers and it holds:

So the practical rule is simple. If you hit a cap twice, upgrade: you pay the same and get about twice the replies. Aide's own worked example agrees: a Starter store using 1,400 replies pays $39 + 400 x $0.15 = $99, and past about 1,730 replies Pro is cheaper.

The other side of a cap is that the AI goes quiet when you reach it. On a Black Friday week that is the point where your team picks up every new message, so set the 80% alert to go to someone who can upgrade.

What will Aide cost for your conversation volume?

Type in your monthly conversations, pick how many AI replies a typical conversation takes, and choose monthly or yearly billing. The calculator finds the cheapest Aide plan that covers you (overage included, caps respected) and puts eesel's per-ticket price beside it.

Enter your monthly conversations and pick replies per conversation to see Aide's cheapest plan, overage and cost per conversation next to eesel's per-ticket price. Prices checked 2026-10-27.

Here is the same math at five volumes, at 2 AI replies per conversation and monthly billing:

Two takeaways. First, at these prices Aide is one of the cheapest AI agents for a Shopify store, well under the Yuma AI and Siena AI price points, and a long way under the managed Adelante AI model. Second, the replies-per-conversation number moves your bill as much as volume does. At 3 replies, 2,500 conversations is 7,500 replies, which maxes out Pro at $499.

For context, Aide's pricing page also has an ROI calculator that defaults to 10,000 conversations and a 40% automation rate and projects $18,400 a month in savings. At 2 replies a conversation, that volume costs $849 a month on Scale. The savings figure is Aide's projection, not a measured result, so test it against your own AI resolution rate during the trial.

Do the Shopify and Zendesk listings match Aide's pricing page?

Not quite. The prices match, but the marketplace listings describe an older version of what each plan includes. Here is what each official surface said on 2026-10-27:

The connector conflict is the one that matters. The Shopify listing says Aide "can also work inside Zendesk, Gorgias or Front" on Pro and Scale, and puts "Connect Zendesk, Gorgias, or Front" under Pro. Aide's own site, its Gorgias integration page and its fact sheet all say the connectors are on every plan, Free included, and the pricing FAQ dates that to October 25, 2026. I'd trust the newer pricing page, but if you are on Starter and need Gorgias, confirm it works before the trial ends.

The 21% versus 20% gap is rounding: $372 against 12 x $39 = $468 is a 20.5% saving. The Zendesk listing's "99% accuracy" line predates Aide's current homepage claim of "100% accurate on what it acts on", which Aide qualifies as acting "only within the rules and confidence your team sets."

I could not find a current Aide listing in the Gorgias app store, so treat Aide's own Gorgias page as the source of truth there.

What costs sit outside Aide's plan price?

Aide's pricing is unusually clear, so the hidden costs are small. They are still worth listing.

Your helpdesk, if you keep it. Aide works inside Zendesk, Gorgias or Front and logs everything there, so that subscription keeps running. Zendesk bills per agent seat (Zendesk pricing), Gorgias by ticket volume (Gorgias pricing), Front per seat (Front pricing). Aide Helpdesk is free, which is the real saving if you are a small team happy to switch.

Copilot usage. Every draft, rewrite, summary or translation Copilot writes for an agent is one AI reply. A 5-person team using Copilot on 40 tickets a day each is 200 replies a day, or about 4,400 over 22 working days. That alone outgrows Pro's 4,000. If your team leans on an AI copilot, budget for it separately from customer-facing replies.

Testing. Previews are free, but drafts in "Watch only" mode and replies to test senders count like any other reply. A careful staged rollout, the kind I'd recommend in my guide to testing an AI agent, spends replies before the AI ever talks to a customer.

Store count. Starter covers 1 store and Pro up to 3. A brand with 4 Shopify stores is on Scale at $499 whatever its volume.

Services and compliance. The setup call starts on Pro. A dedicated account lead, an SLA with service credits and a BAA start on Scale. A custom DPA and audit rights are Enterprise only.

Phone. Voice is not offered on any plan, so phone support stays on whatever you use today.

Is Aide AI worth the price?

For a Shopify store on Zendesk, Gorgias or Front, or one with no helpdesk at all, I think yes. Starting free, keeping your helpdesk, and having order actions like cancels and refunds on every plan is a strong package for $39 to $149 a month.

The safety design matters too. Each topic gets an AI level (AI Agent, Drafts or None), new topics start at Drafts, and refunds wait for a teammate by default, per Aide's homepage. That is the same draft-first, then-automate pattern I hear about constantly from support leads, and it is the right default for order actions that touch money.

Independent reviews are thin and old. Aide's Shopify listing has 2 reviews and its Zendesk listing 6, all 5 stars and all from 2024, before the current pricing:

"We currently use Zendesk and as such needed an AI solution that works with our existing CX platform and allows us to fully leverage our Shopify data to cut down support times and costs."

Patchstore24, Shopify App Store

"Ability to grow into your AI journey at your own pace starting with suggested responses, macro suggestions or precanned messages and then slowly automate once your confident."

Anonymous reviewer, Zendesk Marketplace

I could not find Aide on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot or Reddit. With a free plan, though, you can be your own reviewer at no cost.

Where I'd hesitate:

• You are not on Shopify. Aide is "built for ecommerce brands, with deep Shopify integration", and the order actions are Shopify actions.
• Your helpdesk is not Zendesk, Gorgias or Front. Teams on Freshdesk, Help Scout, HubSpot or Salesforce would have to move to Aide Helpdesk. My Freshdesk pricing guide covers what staying put costs.
• Your threads are long. Per-reply billing rewards short conversations. B2B or technical support, where a ticket runs 6 or 8 messages, multiplies the bill.

If you are still shopping, my lists of Gorgias AI agent alternatives, Zendesk AI alternatives and Front AI alternatives cover the wider field.

How does Aide pricing compare with eesel?

On the sticker, Aide is cheaper for a Shopify store, and I won't pretend otherwise. Pro gives 4,000 AI replies for $149. eesel's Teammate plan is $299 for 500 tickets and $1,749 for 5,000. Even at 3 replies a ticket, Aide's Pro works out to about $0.11 a ticket against eesel's $0.35 to $0.60.

The two products are built for different shapes of team, so here is where each one fits:

A long ticket is where the units part ways. A returns conversation with 6 customer messages is 6 AI replies on Aide and 1 credit on eesel. For short WISMO chats Aide's unit wins easily; for long, multi-step tickets the gap narrows. I walk through that math in my AI customer service cost guide, and the cost per ticket glossary entry has the formula.

The bigger difference is scope. Aide is an ecommerce support agent with a free helpdesk around it. eesel is an AI teammate you hire for a job, and the helpdesk teammate is one of them. Cape Coffee Beans runs eesel on Zendesk and Shopify less as a reply bot and more as a queue manager: about 160 scheduled checks a month that email the founder a list of tickets missing groups or follow-up dates. SamCart runs separate agents on Freshdesk tickets and website chat, answering from about 280 help center articles, which is a stack Aide does not connect to.

If you would rather hand off support entirely, the closer comparison is eesel Managed Support, where eesel runs your support across email, chat, DMs, SMS, WhatsApp, reviews and phone. That is a bigger scope than either self-serve plan and closer to outsourcing customer service.

eesel for Gorgias and Zendesk stores

If you like Aide's idea of an agent that checks the order before it answers, but want a whole ticket billed as one credit, or a helpdesk Aide does not cover, eesel's helpdesk teammate plugs into Gorgias or Zendesk with your Shopify store connected. It learns from your past tickets and macros, looks up the order, then replies or leaves a draft for your team.

Question Beauty is the closest match to an Aide buyer: a cosmetics brand on Gorgias and Shopify. In a month, eesel handled about 990 Gorgias tickets across Messenger, email and chat, sent about 960 replies itself, looked up about 290 Shopify orders and closed about 280 tickets without a person. Refunds and complaints went to the team with a note attached. I compare that setup with the native option in eesel vs Gorgias AI and eesel vs Zendesk AI.

You can start with 100 free credits and run it on your own tickets before paying. Try eesel and see what your queue costs per ticket.