Front AI pricing explained: Is it worth it in 2025?

Front is a popular name in the customer communication world, and like many others, they've jumped headfirst into AI to beef up their platform. On the surface, the features look pretty slick, promising to analyze, assist, and automate your way to a more efficient support team.

But once you start peeling back the layers of the pricing page, things can get confusing. Fast. Between the different subscription tiers, a-la-carte add-ons, and usage-based fees, figuring out the true cost isn't exactly straightforward.

That's where this guide comes in. We’re going to give you a clear, no-fluff breakdown of Front AI's features, the complete Front AI pricing model, and some important limitations you should know about before you sign on the dotted line.

Understanding Front AI and its pricing model

Front AI isn’t just one single tool; it’s a suite of AI features built right into the Front platform. The whole idea is to help your team work smarter, not harder, by tackling different parts of the customer support grind.

The features are generally split into three buckets:

1. Analyze: These tools are all about understanding the why behind your customer conversations. They look at your support history to spot trends and measure quality. This includes features like Topics, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT.

2. Assist: This is about making your human agents faster and more effective. Think of these features as a copilot, helping draft replies, summarize long email chains, and tweak the tone of a message. The main tools here are Copilot, Summarize, and Compose.

3. Automate: This is the part that tries to answer customer questions without anyone on your team lifting a finger. The star of this show is Autopilot, which acts like an AI agent to handle common questions on its own.

These features sound great on paper, and they can definitely give your team a boost. The catch? Most of them aren't included in the standard plans and come with their own price tags, which can add up quicker than you'd think.

Key Front AI features and their impact on pricing

Before we dive into the numbers, let's do a quick rundown of what each of the main AI features actually does. That way, you’ll know what you’d be paying for.

Analyze: Understanding customer conversations

This group of features gives you a bird's-eye view of what’s happening in your support inbox.

• Topics: This feature automatically scans your conversations and sorts them by subject. For example, it can group all tickets about "refunds" or "shipping delays," giving you a clear picture of why customers are reaching out in the first place.

• Smart QA: Instead of having a manager manually check a random sample of tickets for quality, Smart QA uses AI to score agent conversations based on your own criteria, like professionalism or accuracy. The goal is to automate the quality assurance process across all your interactions.

• Smart CSAT: We all know how hard it is to get customers to fill out satisfaction surveys. Smart CSAT tries to get around this by guessing a satisfaction score based on the actual words used in the conversation, giving you a much bigger dataset on how customers are feeling.

Assist features and their associated costs

These tools work alongside your support team to give them an AI-powered hand.

• Copilot: This is Front's agent-assist tool. It reads an incoming message and suggests a reply based on your past conversations and help articles. Your agent can then quickly review the draft, edit it if needed, and send it off. It’s a real time-saver for repetitive questions.

• Summarize & Compose: These are smaller but still useful tools. Summarize gives you a quick, AI-generated summary of a long or complicated conversation. Compose helps you clean up your writing by adjusting the tone, fixing grammar, or making a message shorter or longer.

Automate features and their associated costs

This is where AI takes the wheel.

• Autopilot: This is Front's fully autonomous AI agent. It connects to your knowledge base and tries to answer customer questions on its own, 24/7. If it gets stuck, it hands the conversation over to a human. It's worth noting that Autopilot's performance depends entirely on how good your help content is, and there are some specific limitations there that we'll get into in a bit.

A complete breakdown of Front AI pricing

Okay, let's get to the main event: how much does all of this actually cost? The Front AI pricing is layered, mixing subscription plans with a menu of add-ons. Let's unpack it.

Front's core subscription plans

First, you have to be on a Front plan. There are three main options, and what you get for AI features is very different for each. All prices are per person, per month, and billed annually.

• Starter ($25/seat/mo): This plan is pretty light on AI. You get the basic Topics feature and a measly 10 Copilot suggestions per seat each month. Smart QA, Smart CSAT, and Autopilot are all available, but you have to pay extra for them.

• Professional ($65/seat/mo): This plan has the same limited Copilot usage as Starter. It mainly adds support for more channels and better workflow rules. The key AI features are still paid add-ons.

• Enterprise ($105/seat/mo): This is the first plan where AI starts to feel like part of the deal. You get unlimited Copilot usage, and both Smart QA and Smart CSAT are included. But the big automation tool, Autopilot, still costs extra.

The add-on model

This is where the costs can really start to creep up. If you're on the Starter or Professional plan, or if you want Autopilot on any plan, you'll need to open your wallet for add-ons.

Here’s what you can expect to pay on top of your base plan:

AI Add-On	Price Structure	Available On Plans
Autopilot	$0.89 / resolution	Professional & Enterprise
Copilot	$20 / seat / month (unlimited)	Starter & Professional (Included in Enterprise)
Smart QA	$20 / seat / month	Starter & Professional (Included in Enterprise)
Smart CSAT	$10 / seat / month	Starter & Professional (Included in Enterprise)

So, if you have a team of 10 on the Professional plan and you want the full AI suite, you'd be paying an extra $50 per seat ($20 for Copilot + $20 for Smart QA + $10 for Smart CSAT), plus whatever you rack up in Autopilot fees.

Hidden costs: Unpredictable per-resolution fees

The biggest surprise on your bill will likely come from Autopilot's pricing model: $0.89 per resolution. That might not sound like a lot, but it can make your monthly costs swing wildly.

Front counts a conversation as "resolved" by AI when a customer clicks "Yes, that helped"… or if they just disappear without responding. That's right, you get charged even if the customer just got frustrated and left.

For any business with changing support volumes, this is a huge problem. A busy week, a new product launch, or a small service outage could send your ticket volume soaring, leading to a much larger bill than you planned for. This makes it incredibly difficult to manage your budget.

Key limitations of Front AI to consider

Beyond the tricky pricing, there are a few other things about how Front AI works that might make it a bad fit for your team.

Unpredictable costs and complex packaging

Let's be honest, the pricing model itself is a limitation. Juggling base plans, multiple add-ons for each person, and a per-resolution fee makes budgeting a real headache. You’re left guessing your usage every month, hoping you don't get a nasty surprise on your invoice.

This is a big difference from platforms like eesel AI, which offer clear, predictable monthly plans. With eesel AI, there are no per-resolution fees, so you know exactly what your bill will be, no matter how many customers you help.

Rigid knowledge source restrictions

Front AI is only as smart as the information you give it, and this is where some big problems can pop up. According to Front's own help docs, their system has some serious restrictions:

• Public content only: The AI can only learn from public websites. If your important internal guides are password-protected in a tool like Confluence, the AI can't see them.

• Manual updates: Your knowledge base doesn't sync in real time. You have to remember to manually hit a "re-sync" button to pull in new information, and you can only do it once every 24 hours. This means your AI could be giving customers outdated answers.

• Strict content limits: There’s a hard limit of around 3,000 pages per source. It also can't read certain things like Google Sheets, PDFs, or web pages where you have to click to expand the content.

For a lot of companies, these are dealbreakers. Your most valuable, up-to-date knowledge often lives in private documents that Front AI just can't get to.

Platform lock-in

The biggest pill to swallow is that to use Front AI, you have to use Front as your helpdesk. There's no way to plug their AI tools into another platform like Zendesk.

This means you’re looking at a massive migration project just to get started. You'd have to move all of your agents, workflows, and past conversations over to a brand new system. That’s often an expensive, time-consuming, and risky process. A much simpler path is to find AI that works with the tools you already have.

A more flexible alternative to Front AI

If Front's pricing and limitations have you thinking twice, there's another way. A more modern alternative designed to avoid these exact problems is eesel AI.

Instead of making you switch platforms, eesel AI is a flexible AI layer that integrates directly with the helpdesk you already use, whether that's Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, or others. This means you can get powerful AI up and running in minutes, not months, without throwing your team's current workflow into chaos.

How eesel AI solves Front's limitations

Let's look at how this approach tackles the main pain points we just covered:

Feature	Front AI	eesel AI
Pricing Model	Complex tiers, per-seat add-ons, unpredictable per-resolution fees.	Straightforward monthly plans, no per-resolution fees.
Knowledge Sources	Public content only, manual sync required, strict page limits.	Connects to public and private sources (Confluence, Google Docs), syncs instantly.
Platform Integration	Locked into the Front helpdesk, requires full platform migration.	Integrates with your existing helpdesk (Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc.).

• Predictable Pricing: eesel AI has straightforward monthly plans with no sneaky per-resolution fees. Your bill is consistent and easy to forecast, so you can scale your support without worrying about surprise costs.

• Unified Knowledge: This is a big one. eesel AI connects to all of your knowledge sources, instantly. Private Confluence spaces, internal Google Docs, Notion pages, and even your past ticket history can be used to train the AI. It gets the full picture, so it can give accurate answers.

• No Platform Lock-In: Because eesel AI works with your current helpdesk, you skip the massive cost and risk of a full platform migration. You get top-tier AI without having to abandon the tools your team knows and loves.

• Test with Confidence: eesel AI comes with a powerful simulation mode that lets you test it on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it would perform and get solid predictions on your automation rates before you ever turn it on for live customers.

This video explores modern pricing strategies for AI services, offering insights relevant to evaluating the Front AI pricing model.

Front AI pricing: Choose the AI that fits your workflow

Front AI offers a solid set of tools, but its value is tangled up in a complicated pricing model and some serious platform limitations. The mix of per-seat add-ons, unpredictable resolution fees, and strict knowledge source rules means it just isn't the right fit for every team.

Before you make a move, you have to ask yourself if you’re really prepared to move your entire support operation and live with a variable monthly bill.

For teams that want powerful, flexible, and predictably priced AI that works with their existing tools, it’s worth looking for a solution that adapts to you, not the other way around.

Ready to see what a more flexible AI can do? Explore eesel AI's solutions for customer service.

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