A guide to the Intercom REST API (2025)

You're probably using Intercom every day to chat with customers, and it’s great for that. But what if you could connect it to all the other tools your business relies on? Imagine automating workflows, syncing customer data seamlessly, and building custom experiences without the manual grunt work. That’s the real power behind the Intercom REST API.

Let's be real, the term "API" can sound intimidating, especially if you don't have a developer on speed dial. But don't worry. In this guide, we'll walk through what the Intercom REST API is, what you can do with it, and, most importantly, how you can get all the benefits without needing to become a coding expert overnight.

What is the Intercom REST API?

So, what exactly is a REST API? Think of it as a translator that lets different software programs talk to each other online. The Intercom REST API, specifically, is a set of tools that lets your other apps securely access and modify the data inside your Intercom account.

Instead of manually exporting a user list or updating a customer’s profile by hand, you can use the API to have another application do it for you automatically. As Intercom puts it, their REST API is a "core building block of the Intercom Platform" that you can use to pull, update, create, and delete information.

This lets you do some really useful things, like:

• Syncing conversations and customer data with your CRM.

• Adding more context to user profiles with info from your internal database.

• Building custom alerts for your support team in Slack.

Understanding key Intercom REST API data models

Before you start building anything, it helps to know how Intercom organizes its information. It groups everything into a few core categories. Once you get the hang of these, you’ll have a much clearer picture of what you can actually do with the API.

Contacts: Visitors, leads, and users

Intercom breaks down the people you interact with into three groups:

• Visitors: Anonymous people browsing your website before they've started a chat.

• Leads: Visitors who have sent a message or replied to one. This is when Intercom starts keeping a history of their activity.

• Users: Leads who have signed up for your product or logged into an existing account.

Conversations and messages

This is the bread and butter of all communication in Intercom:

• Messages: Any single piece of communication, whether it's from your team, a chatbot, or a customer.

• Conversations: The entire thread of messages between you and a customer.

A view of the Intercom conversational messenger, a key part of the Intercom REST API.

Companies, attributes, and events

These bits of data help you organize your contacts and add important context:

• Companies: Lets you group contacts by the organization they belong to.

• Attributes: These are just fields that store details about a contact or company, like their name, email, subscription plan, or any other custom data you want to keep track of.

• Events: Actions your contacts take that you want to track, like product usage or specific website activity.

Other important data types

You'll also run into these objects for internal team organization and tracking issues:

• Tags and Segments: Used for labeling and grouping contacts so you can filter them or send targeted messages.

• Notes: Internal comments your team can add to a contact's profile.

• Tickets: A more formal way to track and manage specific user requests within Intercom.

A screenshot of the Intercom ticket view, which can be managed via the Intercom REST API, showing customer details.

Common use cases (and limitations) of the Intercom REST API

The API sounds great in theory, right? You can build all sorts of cool things to customize your support. But actually building and maintaining these integrations can be a real headache, with plenty of hidden costs and complications.

Syncing lead and customer data

A common goal is to sync new leads from Intercom over to your CRM, or pull data from your internal tools to give agents more context in their conversations. The catch? You have to write and host custom code to manage all of this. And if Intercom or your CRM updates their API, your custom integration could break, leaving your data out of sync at the worst possible time.

Building custom chatbots and workflows

Another idea is building custom bots that do more than Intercom’s native ones, like checking an order status in Shopify or verifying an account feature. This is a massive development project. You'd have to manage the conversation flow, logic, and calls to other systems, all while staying within Intercom's API limits.

Honestly, it's a full-time job. Instead of building from the ground up, a platform like eesel AI lets you create powerful AI agents in minutes. With simple integrations for tools like Intercom and your own knowledge base, you can have an autonomous agent handling complex questions without writing a line of code. You also get complete control over the AI's personality and the specific actions it can perform.

An example of a visual workflow builder that simplifies processes compared to building directly with the Intercom REST API.

Creating alerts and managing team assignments

Or maybe you want to automatically assign conversations to agents in a round-robin style, or get a Slack alert when a VIP customer messages in. To do this yourself, you'd need a developer to build a service that's always listening for these events. It's another piece of custom tech your team has to build, monitor, and fix when it breaks.

This is another spot where a dedicated AI tool saves a ton of effort. For instance, eesel AI's triage automation plugs right into your helpdesk to automate routing and tagging, so your team can stop organizing queues and start talking to customers.

How to get started with the Intercom REST API

Okay, so you’ve heard the warnings and still want to dive in and build something yourself. Fair enough. Here’s a quick overview of what that process looks like.

Authentication and making your first call

To get started with the API, you first need an Access Token from your Intercom developer settings. This token is just a key that proves you have permission to access your workspace's data. You then include this token in your requests. For example, you could use a simple "cURL" command to fetch a list of admins in your workspace.

Navigating key Intercom REST API endpoints

The API is broken down into different "endpoints," which are just URLs for accessing different kinds of data. The most common ones you'll use are for the data models we talked about earlier:

• "/contacts"

• "/conversations"

• "/companies"

• "/tickets"

• "/messages"

The simpler, no-code alternative to the Intercom REST API

Building with the Intercom REST API gives you a lot of control, but it's a huge commitment of time, money, and developer hours. For most support teams, it's just not practical. A much faster approach is to use a platform that handles all that heavy lifting for you.

eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can connect Intercom with one click and get up and running in minutes, not months. You can even simulate the AI on thousands of your past tickets to see an accurate forecast of your resolution rate before you ever turn it on for customers. No more guesswork.

Intercom pricing

Speaking of costs, it’s also important to look at how Intercom itself structures its pricing, especially when it comes to their own AI features. Their main plans are priced per agent, but their AI agent, Fin, is sold separately.

According to their pricing page, Fin costs $0.99 per resolution. What this means is that on top of what you pay for each agent, you get an extra charge every time the AI successfully closes a ticket. This can make your monthly bill pretty unpredictable, since it changes based on your support volume.

This pay-as-you-go model is pretty common, but it can be a real pain for budgeting. At eesel AI, we do things differently. Our pricing is straightforward and predictable, based on a set number of AI interactions each month. You get all our tools, the AI Agent, Copilot, and Triage, rolled into one simple plan with no surprise fees.

Plan	Seat Price/mo (billed annually)	Fin AI Agent Cost
Essential	$29	+ $0.99 per resolution
Advanced	$85	+ $0.99 per resolution
Expert	$132	+ $0.99 per resolution

Go beyond the basics of the Intercom REST API

So, what's the takeaway? The Intercom REST API is a fantastic tool that can help you create custom workflows and connect your data. But trying to build everything yourself is a long, expensive road filled with technical hurdles and ongoing maintenance.

Modern AI platforms give you a much faster and more accessible way to get the same, if not better, results. Instead of wrestling with code, you can use a tool like eesel AI to unify all your knowledge sources and automate support, all while keeping the tools your team already loves.

Automate your Intercom support in minutes

Ready to see what a purpose-built AI agent can do for your support team? Connect your Intercom helpdesk in one click and start your free trial with eesel AI. No developer required.

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