HelpScout pricing 2025: Plans, features & is it worth it?

If you’ve been looking at HelpScout recently, you’ve probably noticed something… different. The company flipped its entire business model, ditching the familiar per-user pricing for a new system based on how many contacts you help. This move has people talking (and worrying a little) on places like Reddit, with many wondering if the new model will make their costs completely unpredictable.

So, what’s the real story with the new HelpScout pricing? Is it still a good value, or are you in for a surprise on your next bill? Let’s break down Help Scout’s 2025 pricing structure, see what you actually get for your money, and figure out if it’s the right call for your team.

Help Scout pricing: Understanding the move to a contact-based model

For years, Help Scout’s pricing was refreshingly simple: you paid a flat fee for each agent on your team. It was easy to predict and scaled up as you hired. Well, that’s all in the past now.

The new model gets rid of per-seat fees. Instead, you’re charged based on the number of "contacts helped" each month. This means you can have as many users as you want on any plan, but your bill is now tied directly to how busy your support queue is.

According to Help Scout’s own guide, a "contact" is any unique person who gets a reply from your team or an answer from the AI assistant in a given month. The good news? Chatting with the same person ten times still only counts as one contact.

To stop you from having a heart attack every time you have a busy month, they’ve also rolled out a "Fair Billing Policy." It calculates your bill using your average contacts over the last three months, which helps smooth out seasonal spikes. But as we’re about to see, how much it "helps" is up for debate.

Help Scout pricing plans in 2025

Help Scout’s new pricing is split into four tiers. They all come with unlimited users, but the limits on monthly contacts and features are where you’ll see the differences.

Here’s a closer look at how the plans compare.

Feature	Free	Standard	Plus	Pro
Price	$0/month	Starts at $25/month	Starts at $75/month	Contact Sales
Contacts Included	100/month	100/month	200/month	Starts at 1,000/month
Users	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Shared Inboxes	1	2 (add more for $10/mo)	5 (add more for $10/mo)	Custom
Knowledge Bases	1	1 (add more for $20/mo)	3 (add more for $20/mo)	Custom
AI Features	Included	Included	Included	Included
Key Integrations	100+ Apps	100+ Apps	Salesforce, Jira, HubSpot	Advanced Security/SAML
Reporting	Basic (30 days)	Advanced (2 years)	Unlimited History	Unlimited History

Source: Help Scout Pricing Page

Looking at the table, the real gotchas are the number of contacts, inboxes, and knowledge bases you get. While every plan has access to over 100 integrations, the ones many businesses can’t live without, like Salesforce, Jira, and HubSpot, are locked away in the pricier Plus plan. And while "unlimited users" and built-in AI sound amazing, your actual costs are now tied to customer interactions, a metric that can be famously tricky to forecast.

Core features breakdown: What do you get with Help Scout pricing?

Let’s dig into what Help Scout actually packs into its new plans.

Unlimited users and collaboration

On paper, this is the biggest perk of the new model. You can invite your entire company, from product and sales to engineering, to look at and chip in on customer conversations without paying for more seats. Help Scout calls this making customer delight a "team sport." It’s a nice thought for companies trying to get everyone on the same page and be more customer-focused.

Built-in AI features

Every Help Scout plan, even the free one, now ships with a set of AI tools:

• AI Answers: A chatbot that pulls from your knowledge base to give instant answers.

• AI Drafts: Suggests replies for your agents based on past conversations.

• AI Assist: Helps agents tweak replies for tone, length, or translation.

• AI Summarize: Gives you the short version of long conversation threads.

Having AI included is handy, but it’s not without its downsides. The AI is trained only on your Help Scout content and doesn’t offer much in the way of customization. But what if your team’s real brain lives in internal wikis in Confluence or design docs in Google Docs? The built-in AI won’t see any of it. For teams that need more say over how their AI behaves or want to test it before going live, these tools can feel a bit rigid. A dedicated AI layer like eesel AI gives you that deeper control without forcing you to migrate your whole help desk.

Reporting and integrations

Help Scout gives you dashboards to track your support volume and team performance, but there’s a limit to how far back you can look. The Standard plan only holds two years of data, and the Free plan forgets everything after just 30 days. As we mentioned, while you get over 100 integrations, you’ll have to shell out for the Plus plan to connect with business-critical tools like Jira and Salesforce.

Is the new Help Scout pricing model worth it?

Alright, the big question: does this new pricing actually make sense for your business? Here’s a rundown of the good and the bad.

The pros: where Help Scout pricing makes sense

• Good for stable businesses: The three-month averaging helps smooth out small bumps, so if your support volume is as steady as a rock, this could work for you.

• Gets the whole team involved: The unlimited user model is a genuine win for companies that want everyone, not just the support team, to have a pulse on the customer.

• Keeps things simple: It’s an all-in-one platform where AI is baked in from the start, so you don’t have to fiddle with add-on fees for basic AI features.

The cons: where Help Scout pricing falls short

• A nightmare for growing businesses: For seasonal companies or startups hitting a growth spurt, this model is a liability. One good marketing campaign could double your support tickets, and your bill.

• Some serious price hikes: As developer Daniel Jalkut pointed out, many long-time customers are facing steep price increases that are tough to swallow.

• The free plan holds your data hostage: The free plan’s block on API access and data exports is a huge drawback. In this day and age, not being able to easily take your data with you feels like a dealbreaker.

• Vulnerable to spam attacks: The contact-based model could be exploited by spam bots or trolls who intentionally inflate your interaction count and your costs. It’s a real concern that users have brought up, and it shouldn’t be ignored.

A more flexible alternative: Augmenting your help desk with a dedicated AI layer

Moving your entire help desk just to get better AI is a massive headache. A much smarter and more affordable way is to add a dedicated AI platform on top of the tools you already know and use.

This is exactly what eesel AI does. Instead of locking you into one system, eesel AI works with your existing help desk, whether that’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, or something else. You get to keep your current setup and skip the pain of a huge data migration.

With this layered approach, you get way more control and clarity:

• Train it on everything: eesel AI learns from all your company knowledge, not just one app. Connect it to past tickets, internal wikis, Google Docs, and even product data from your Shopify store.

• Try before you buy: Worried about a rogue AI? eesel lets you test its performance on your past tickets in a "sandbox" mode. You can see how accurate it is and what it can save you before you flip the switch, taking the financial guesswork out of the equation.

• Do more than just reply: eesel AI can take action. It can perform API calls to tag tickets, route conversations, update customer info in your CRM, or check order statuses.

• Pricing that makes sense: eesel’s pricing is based on the number of AI interactions (a reply or an action), which you have total control over. You choose what to automate, so you’ll never be surprised by a bill.

Making the right choice about Help Scout pricing for your team

So, Help Scout took a big swing with this new pricing model. It’s designed to encourage collaboration across the whole company, but it also brings a lot of cost uncertainty that could be risky for many businesses. If your team values simplicity above all else and has incredibly stable support volumes, it might still be a great choice.

But for most companies today that need to keep costs in check and want powerful, flexible AI, the all-in-one approach is starting to feel dated. The modern way is to pick the best tool for each job. Instead of getting locked into one platform’s pricing and limitations, you can add a powerful AI layer to your favorite help desk that grows with you.

Ready to see what a dedicated AI platform can do for your team? Try eesel AI for free or book a demo and see how you can automate support with total control and transparency.