A guide to Intercom Mobile Carousels: Features, pricing, and limitations

Keeping mobile app users engaged is a tough gig. With dozens of other apps fighting for their attention, a clunky first impression can lead to a quick uninstall before they even see what your app can really do. This is why tools for onboarding and in-app messaging have become so essential.

One of the big names in this space is Intercom Mobile Carousels. It’s a popular, no-code feature that helps you build better mobile onboarding flows, announce new features, and guide users. But is it the right tool for you? This guide breaks it all down: what the feature does, how people use it, how much it costs, and some key limitations you need to be aware of, especially if you’re trying to scale your support.

What are Intercom Mobile Carousels?

Intercom Mobile Carousels are basically multi-page, interactive messages that you can display to users right inside your native iOS or Android app. Think of them as a little stack of swipeable cards that can pop up at just the right moment.

Intercom themselves will tell you they're built for a few key jobs:

• Onboarding new users by showing them the ropes and walking them through key features.

• Announcing new products, features, or promotions to everyone.

• Providing proactive support by giving users a heads-up about known issues or changes.

• Requesting device permissions, like for push notifications or location, by first explaining why you need them.

At its heart, this is an outbound messaging tool. It’s fantastic for broadcasting information and steering users through a set path, but it’s not a conversational AI that can understand and solve a customer’s unique problem on the spot.

Key features and use cases

So, what can you actually do with this thing? Let's get into the specifics of how it works and what teams can build.

The no-code builder for visual engagement

One of the biggest selling points for Mobile Carousels is its friendly editor. It’s a drag-and-drop interface, which means non-technical teams (think marketing, product, or support) can create and launch carousels without having to bug an engineer.

You get a fair bit of creative control. You can use their templates or start from scratch, picking different layouts for each screen. The builder also lets you add images and GIFs and tweak the colors to match your app’s branding, so the whole thing feels like a natural part of your app.

Driving user actions and permissions

Carousels aren't just for showing information; they're meant to be interactive. You can add buttons to each screen that can do a bunch of different things:

• Deep link to a specific screen or feature inside your app.

• Open an external URL, like a blog post or a page to leave a review.

• Start a conversation in the Intercom Messenger.

• Prompt for native device permissions like camera or microphone access.

That last one is especially handy. Instead of just hitting your users with a generic "Allow Notifications?" pop-up, you can use a carousel to first explain why they should say yes. Giving that bit of context usually boosts opt-in rates quite a bit.

Targeting and personalization

You wouldn’t want to show a brand-new user the same message you show a seasoned pro. Intercom lets you segment your audience and target carousels based on user data, like their subscription plan, how long they've been a customer, or any custom data you track. You can also A/B test different carousels to see which headline, image, or call to action works best.

While this rule-based targeting is useful, here's the catch: it's all on you. You have to define every rule and build every message yourself. The system doesn't just adapt on the fly to what a user is struggling with in that moment, which is a major difference when you compare it to a real AI support tool.

Setup process and inherent limitations

Getting your first Mobile Carousel live is one thing, but relying on them as you grow is another story. Here’s a look at the practical side of using this tool and the headaches that can pop up down the road.

How to get started

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. Your developers will need to install the Intercom Mobile SDK for iOS or Android. Once that’s done, your team can start designing content in the Intercom dashboard, defining the audience, and setting the rules for when a carousel should appear.

Limitation 1: Manual content creation and maintenance

Every single carousel, for every new feature, onboarding flow, or marketing push, has to be built by hand. This puts your team on a content treadmill. As your product changes, your backlog of carousels to create, test, and update just keeps growing.

This is a world away from how modern AI works. A platform like eesel AI doesn’t rely on hand-built content. Instead, it plugs directly into the knowledge you already have, like your past Intercom tickets, help center articles, and internal docs on Confluence or Google Docs. Your AI stays current with your latest information automatically, without anyone having to build a single message.

Limitation 2: Not a true support automation tool

While Mobile Carousels are good at guiding users, they can't actually solve their problems. If a user has a specific, tricky question, the carousel can only point them to a help article or ask them to start a new chat with a human agent.

This means that instead of shrinking your support queue, carousels often just create a new front door to the same long line. For teams trying to scale and handle more tickets, this doesn't fix the core issue; it just gives customers one more way to ask for help.

Limitation 3: Siloed and limited reporting

The reporting for carousels in Intercom is decent for what it is. You can track things like how many people saw it, how many finished it, and whether they completed a goal you set. The problem is that these analytics exist in their own little bubble.

They tell you how a specific message performed, but they don't give you the big picture of your support operation. More importantly, they can’t tell you which gaps in your knowledge base are causing the same questions to pop up over and over. In contrast, eesel AI's reporting is designed to do just that. It analyzes conversations to pinpoint knowledge gaps, giving you real insights you can use to make your AI, your documentation, and your entire customer experience better.

Pricing for Intercom Mobile Carousels

Figuring out what Intercom Mobile Carousels will cost you isn't as simple as finding a single price. The cost is a mix of a base plan, per-agent fees, and a required add-on, which can make budgeting a real challenge.

The base plan and seat costs

First off, you need an Intercom subscription. Their plans are mostly priced per agent, so you'll need at least one seat. According to their pricing page, the plans are:

• Essential: Starts at $29 per seat/month

• Advanced: Starts at $85 per seat/month

• Expert: Starts at $132 per seat/month

This is your starting cost, and it goes up as you add more people to your team.

The "Proactive Support Plus" add-on

Here’s the key part: to even get Mobile Carousels, you have to buy the "Proactive Support Plus" add-on. That’s another $99 per month. This add-on also bundles in other features like Product Tours and Surveys.

This fee only covers 500 "Messages Sent" per month. Every time a carousel is shown to a user, it counts as one message. If you have a lot of users or run a few different campaigns, you can blow through that limit in no time. Anything over 500 messages gets hit with extra pay-as-you-go fees.

Why the total cost is hard to predict

When you piece it all together, you're looking at a mix of fixed agent fees, a fixed add-on cost, and variable usage fees. This model makes it tough to know what your bill will be each month and can lead to some unpleasant surprises, especially when you're having a busy month.

Let’s do some quick math for a small team:

Cost Component	Example: Team of 5 on Advanced Plan
Base Plan (5 seats x $85)	$425 / month
Proactive Support Add-on	$99 / month
Minimum Monthly Cost	$524 / month
Potential Overage Fees	Variable

This kind of unpredictable pricing ends up punishing you for engaging more with your users, which is the exact opposite of what you want from a growth tool.

Beyond manual messaging: Why AI is the future of mobile support

If you feel like you're outgrowing manual messaging tools like Mobile Carousels, the next step isn't to just hire more people to do more manual work; it's to embrace smart automation.

Go from manual messages to autonomous support

Mobile Carousels are step one: sending manual, one-way messages. But to really scale, you need automation that can handle real two-way conversations. This is where a platform like eesel AI enters the picture. It’s designed to work with your existing tools, not make you start over. eesel plugs right into your Intercom account, so you get all the benefits of AI without ditching the helpdesk your team already uses every day.

While a carousel can only send a user to an agent, eesel's AI Agent can actually resolve customer questions right inside the Intercom Messenger, giving instant, accurate answers 24/7.

Unify your knowledge, not just what you build by hand

Remember the content treadmill problem? eesel AI solves it by automatically training on all the knowledge you already have. It learns from your past support tickets, your help center, and your internal wikis. With simple, one-click integrations, you can connect your knowledge and have a fully trained AI agent ready to go in minutes, not months.

Test with confidence and gain actionable insights

Instead of just A/B testing a line of copy, what if you could test your entire automation setup on real-world data before it ever goes live? eesel AI’s simulation mode lets you do exactly that. You can run the AI on thousands of your past tickets to see precisely how it would have performed, giving you an accurate preview of your resolution rates and ROI. It’s a completely risk-free way to roll out automation.

Transparent pricing that scales with you

The unpredictable pricing of add-ons and overage fees can be a huge headache. eesel AI offers simple, predictable plans based on your overall interaction volume. There are no per-resolution fees, so we're on your side. The more you automate, the more you save. It's a model built to reward efficiency, not penalize it.

Are Intercom Mobile Carousels right for you?

Intercom Mobile Carousels are a solid tool for what they were designed to do. If your main goal is to create visual, manually-triggered onboarding flows or make simple announcements to your mobile users, it’s a perfectly good place to start.

But for businesses that are scaling, the cracks start to show pretty quickly. The platform takes a lot of manual effort to maintain, it can’t actually handle conversational support, and the pricing model is both complex and unpredictable.

Ultimately, it comes down to what you're trying to achieve. For simple outbound messaging, carousels will get the job done. But for teams that need to genuinely reduce their ticket volume, automate resolutions, and scale their support efficiently, adding an AI layer is the clear next move.

Take your mobile support further with eesel AI

Ready to move beyond manual messages? See how eesel AI can plug into your Intercom helpdesk and start automating your frontline support in minutes.

Start a free trial or book a demo to see it in action.