Gorgias ticket limit: A complete 2025 guide to its pricing model

If you're running an e-commerce brand, you've probably heard of Gorgias. It’s one of the go-to helpdesks for stores on Shopify, and for good reason, it’s great at pulling all your customer conversations into one spot. But as many growing brands find out, sometimes the hard way, there’s a catch that can turn your neat monthly budget into a bit of a lottery: the Gorgias ticket limit.

The real issue isn't just that there's a limit. It's the rollercoaster of a usage-based pricing model. You run a killer marketing campaign, a product goes viral on TikTok, or the holiday rush hits, and suddenly you’ve blown past your ticket allowance. The result? Surprise fees that can really sting.

This guide is here to clear the fog. We're going to pull back the curtain on what Gorgias actually counts as a "billable ticket," how those overage charges sneak up on you, and why this whole system can feel like it's holding your business back. Getting a handle on this model is the first step to finding a smarter, more predictable way to manage your customer support as you grow.

What is Gorgias?

At its core, Gorgias is a customer service helpdesk designed specifically with e-commerce businesses in mind. Its biggest selling point is how it centralizes all your customer chats, from email, live chat, social media comments, you name it, into a single, organized dashboard.

A look at the Gorgias dashboard, which centralizes customer conversations from multiple channels into one view.

It plays especially well with platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. This means your support agents can see a customer's order history and shipping details right next to their message, which saves a ton of time.

But here’s the key difference: unlike a lot of software that charges you per support agent (often called a "per-seat" model), Gorgias’s pricing revolves around ticket volume. Your monthly bill is tied directly to the number of customer inquiries you handle. This one detail shapes everything from your budget to how your team approaches support.

How the Gorgias ticket limit and pricing actually work

Gorgias builds its entire pricing structure around a monthly allowance of "billable tickets." Once you get how this works, it becomes pretty clear how your costs can suddenly spiral. Let’s break it down.

What counts as a billable ticket?

First things first, what does Gorgias actually consider a "billable ticket"? According to their own docs, a ticket becomes billable the moment a message is sent from your Gorgias account in response to it. It doesn’t matter if that reply was typed out by a person, sent by an automated Rule, or handled by the Gorgias AI. One reply from your end, and ding, it counts against your monthly limit.

This sounds straightforward, but some everyday situations can burn through your ticket allowance a lot faster than you’d think:

• Automated noise and spam: Got an auto-responder set up to let customers know you received their email? That’s great for customer experience, but it replies to everything. That includes spam, marketing emails, and out-of-office messages. Each of those automatic replies can count as a billable ticket.

• Proactive chat campaigns: That friendly little chat bubble that pops up on your website is a fantastic tool for engaging visitors. But every time a customer replies to one of its prompts, a new billable ticket is created. If your campaign is effective, you’re paying for that engagement ticket by ticket.

• Re-opened conversations: Picture this: a customer's issue is solved, and the ticket is closed. A week later, they reply to the same email thread with a new question. Instead of just reopening the old ticket, Gorgias often creates a brand-new, billable ticket. You're effectively getting charged twice for a continuing conversation with a single customer.

• The AI "double-dip": This one can be a real surprise. If you're using the Gorgias AI Agent and it successfully resolves an issue all on its own, you might get hit with two separate fees. There’s an "automation fee" for the AI doing the work, and then a "helpdesk ticket fee" because a message was sent from your account to resolve it.

An example of the Gorgias AI assistant handling a customer query, which can sometimes incur both an automation fee and count towards the Gorgias ticket limit.

What happens when you go over the Gorgias ticket limit?

This is where things get expensive. When you hit your monthly ticket limit, Gorgias doesn't just stop working or prompt you to upgrade your plan. It automatically starts charging you for extra blocks of tickets in the form of overage fees.

Let's look at their popular Basic plan as an example. It gives you 300 tickets for $60 a month. If you use more than that, you'll pay an extra $40 for every additional 100 tickets.

Imagine your e-commerce store runs a huge Black Friday sale. Your support volume, which is normally around 280 tickets a month, suddenly jumps to 500. Here’s the math:

• Your base fee: $60 (for the first 300 tickets)

• Overage for tickets 301-400: +$40

• Overage for tickets 401-500: +$40

Your bill for the month just went from a predictable $60 to $140. It more than doubled, all because your sale was a success. This model makes financial forecasting a real headache, especially for seasonal businesses or any brand that's actively trying to scale.

The headaches of the Gorgias ticket limit for growing businesses

The problems with a ticket-based model aren't just about the numbers on your invoice. This way of pricing can create some serious strategic roadblocks that actually work against a growing company.

First, there's the huge budget unpredictability. A product feature on a popular blog, a new collection launch, or even a minor shipping delay from your carrier can send your ticket volume through the roof without any warning. Your subscription fee, which you probably logged as a fixed operational cost, suddenly becomes a variable expense you have no real control over. This makes it incredibly difficult to budget for things you actually want to invest in, like hiring another support agent or boosting your ad spend.

Second, this model can subtly discourage your team from providing top-notch customer support. When every single reply has a potential price tag attached, there's an unspoken pressure on agents to resolve issues in as few messages as possible. This can lead to rushed answers or a hesitation to follow up to see if a customer is truly happy. It can prevent your team from delivering that thoughtful, above-and-beyond service that turns a one-time buyer into a loyal, repeat customer.

Finally, and this is the big one, it creates a fundamental scalability problem. As your business grows and your customer base expands, your ticket volume is going to go up. That's just a sign of success. But a ticket-based pricing model effectively penalizes you for that growth. The more successful you become, the more you pay for your helpdesk. It creates a direct conflict between your goal of scaling the business and your need to control operational costs.

Exploring alternatives to the Gorgias ticket limit

It feels a bit backward to be penalized for growth, right? What if your support tools celebrated your success instead of sending you a bigger bill for it? A more modern approach to support automation is all about providing predictable value, not counting every single ticket. This is where an AI layer like eesel AI comes into the picture, offering a smarter way to scale your support without the stress of a ticking ticket counter.

Instead of asking you to ditch your current setup, eesel AI plugs directly into the helpdesk you already use, including Gorgias, to automate responses and help out your agents. Here’s how it tackles the main problems of the ticket-based model:

• Predictable pricing that actually makes sense: The pricing for eesel AI is built around a simple flat monthly fee. This includes a huge pool of "AI interactions" (which is just an AI reply or an action it takes). There are no hidden per-resolution fees and absolutely no surprise overage charges if you have a busy month. Your costs are fixed and predictable, so you can budget with confidence and grow without worrying about a massive bill.

• Get it running in minutes, not months: Let’s be honest, nobody wants to deal with a painful, months-long migration to a new software platform. eesel AI is designed to be ridiculously easy to set up yourself. You can connect it to your helpdesk with a single click and start automating simple questions almost immediately. There’s no need to "rip and replace" the tools your team already knows how to use.

• Test it out with confidence before you commit: One of the biggest worries with any new tool is whether it will actually deliver. eesel AI takes that uncertainty off the table with a powerful simulation mode. You can run the AI on thousands of your own past tickets to get a super accurate forecast of its performance and see what its resolution rate would have been. You get to see the value with your own data, completely risk-free, before you turn it on for live customers.

• You stay in complete control of the automation: eesel AI isn't an all-or-nothing system. It gives you fine-grained control to decide exactly which types of tickets the AI should handle. You can start small by automating the easy, repetitive questions like "Where is my order?" and have it automatically escalate everything else to your human agents. As you get more comfortable, you can gradually let it handle more.

Gorgias ticket limit: Pricing plans in full

For complete transparency, here’s a full breakdown of the standard Gorgias pricing plans. It’s important to keep in mind that these base prices only cover the specified number of helpdesk tickets. Any extras will cost more.

Plan	Price (Monthly)	Billable Tickets Included	Overage Cost	Best For
Starter	$10/mo	50 / month	+$0.40 / ticket	Very small stores with minimal support volume.
Basic	$60/mo	300 / month	+$40 / 100 tickets	Small teams managing a few hundred inquiries per month.
Pro	$360/mo	2,000 / month	+$36 / 100 tickets	Growing brands that need more integrations and reporting.
Advanced	$900/mo	5,000 / month	+$36 / 100 tickets	Larger teams with complex support needs and higher volume.
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	High-volume businesses requiring custom terms and support.

It's also worth noting that add-ons like Voice and SMS support come with their own separate usage-based fees. On top of that, if you use the Gorgias AI Agent, interactions it handles can incur their own automation fees in addition to counting as a billable helpdesk ticket.

Beyond the Gorgias ticket limit: Invest in a help desk that grows with you

Gorgias is a solid tool, and it works well for many e-commerce stores. But its ticket-based pricing model can create some real headaches for ambitious businesses that are focused on growth. The unpredictable costs and the feeling that you're being penalized for success can hold you back right when you're starting to hit your stride.

Modern AI platforms offer a more flexible, powerful, and, most importantly, predictable way to scale your customer support. By changing the focus from counting tickets to delivering value, these tools give your team the freedom to provide amazing service without having to worry about the budget. It’s time to think about a solution that aligns with your growth, not one that puts a tax on it.

Ready for predictable pricing and powerful automation that works with your existing helpdesk? Try eesel AI today and see how much you can automate with our risk-free simulation mode.