Willdesk pricing 2026: every plan, the AI fee, and what you'll really pay

Work out your Willdesk bill

Type in how many conversations your team answers a month and whether you want the AI agent on. The calculator picks the cheapest Willdesk tier for that volume, adds overage, AI and order-tracking charges, and shows how the bill splits. All rates come from willdesk.com, Willdesk's help center and the Shopify App Store listing, checked October 21, 2026.

Type your monthly conversations to see Willdesk's cheapest tier, the AI charge and the total. Overage is shown per conversation; WhatsApp add-ons aren't included.

Willdesk pricing plans at a glance

Willdesk is a Shopify helpdesk from Channelwill: a shared inbox for email, live chat, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, plus a help center, order tracking and an AI agent. Its App Store listing, "Willdesk: Live Chat&AI Chatbot", has 4.7 stars from 380 reviews and launched on February 22, 2021. If you're still choosing a category of tool, my ecommerce helpdesk guide explains what a helpdesk does that a chat widget doesn't.

The page opens on annual prices, and each paid plan has a slider for conversation volume. Here is every step of that slider, with the monthly price and the annual price.

Every plan has unlimited agent seats, which is unusual for a helpdesk. You don't pay more when you add a teammate, the way you do on Zendesk or Freshdesk. Charges are "billed in USD" and "every 30 days" through your Shopify bill, per the listing, so they sit next to your store plan. My Shopify pricing guide covers that base layer.

Here's what each tier adds on top of conversations:

• Free: live chat, email integration, a contact form, macros and quick replies, a help center with unlimited articles, and Shopify order, product and coupon data in the inbox.
• Basic: everything in Free, plus 3 stores, the automation bot and rules, a custom FAQ domain, premium FAQ templates, tagging, and syncing customers to Shopify for tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp.
• Pro: everything in Basic, plus multiple stores and a customer success manager.

How Willdesk's billing unit works

Willdesk charges for conversations your team answers. Its pricing FAQ is specific about it: "Conversation credit will be deducted only after a session has been answered by the agent." A chat that a visitor opens and abandons, or a spam email nobody replies to, shouldn't cost you anything.

That's a fairer unit than most. When a German jewelry brand trialed eesel on about 1,000 tickets a month, it turned out that 22% of its tickets were spam. On a plan that counts every inbound ticket, that's a fifth of the allowance gone. Willdesk's "answered" rule means you only pay for work your team or bot did. My explainer on deflection vs resolution rate goes into why the counting rule matters more than the sticker.

The tiers climb in steps, and the per-conversation cost falls as you go up.

The awkward stretch is between Basic's top step and Pro's first one. At 700 conversations a month, Basic 500 plus 200 conversations of overage costs $42.90 + $24 = $66.90, which is still less than Pro at $89.90. Before AI, Basic plus overage stays cheaper than Pro up to about 890 conversations, and Pro wins from there. The calculator above does that comparison for you.

What the Willdesk AI agent costs

This is the part of Willdesk pricing that the plan cards don't show. The pricing page has an "Enable Will AI Agent" section with no price on it. The price is in the help center article on subscribing to AI:

• $0.20 per conversation quota after AI is switched on.
• The AI quota follows your conversation quota. When you raise conversations, the AI quota rises with it.
• 10 free one-time AI quotas per workspace to try it.
• Every AI action counts once: an AI reply, "AI optimize" on a draft, or an AI translation. Once a conversation has used a quota, more AI in that same conversation is free.
• When quotas run out, AI features switch off until you buy more.

The Shopify listing states the same rate as overage: $20 per 100 AI conversations on Basic and $200 per 1,000 on Pro. Here's what that does to three common setups.

So the AI more than doubles every bill. That doesn't make it bad value: 20 cents to answer a "where is my order" chat without a person is cheap next to an agent's time, and it's lower than the $0.40 per extra AI conversation Chatty charges. The catch is that the quota is sized to your conversation plan, not to what the AI handles. If the bot only takes half your chats, you still pay for AI on the full quota.

The AI's knowledge has a size limit too. Per the help center article on the AI knowledge base, plans with 1,000 conversations or fewer can enable up to 1,000 products. Above that, the product limit matches the conversation limit, so 2,000 conversations lets the AI learn 2,000 products. A store with 3,000 SKUs and 500 chats a month would need to ask Willdesk for a custom plan.

One reviewer noticed the AI cost late:

"The pricing is in our opinion a bit misleading. AI is mentioned everywhere in the app store page but you need to pay extra fees which are not disclosed on the app store page, so you might not find this out until after you have invested time evaluating the product."

Before & Ever, Shopify App Store

That review is from June 2025, and Channelwill replied that it was reviewing how it presents AI fees. The current listing does now show the AI overage line on each paid plan, so this has partly been fixed. It's still easy to miss. If you're weighing AI tools for this job, my roundup of AI for order tracking compares how other tools bill for it.

The add-ons: order tracking and WhatsApp

Two more meters sit beside conversations.

Order tracking. Willdesk tracks shipments through the TrackingMore API by default. Free includes 20 lookups a month, and paid plans include as many lookups as conversations (100 on Basic 100, 1,000 on Pro 1,000). Past that, it's $4 per extra 100 tracked orders. The pricing page also lets you pre-buy more lookups, which works out cheaper: the page's own math adds $2.50 per 100 on Basic and $20 per 1,000 on Pro. If you already run Parcel Panel or TrackingMore in Shopify, Willdesk pulls tracking from that app and doesn't deduct its own quota, per its order tracker FAQ. Without one of those apps, only orders with tracking numbers from the last 30 days, plus new orders, count.

WhatsApp. WhatsApp isn't on the Free plan. On Basic and Pro it's a paid add-on that the comparison table lists at $10 per 100. If WhatsApp is a big channel for you, price it on the pricing page's WhatsApp picker before you commit, and see my guide to WhatsApp support for ecommerce for how other tools bill it.

For most stores, tracking is the add-on that matters. "Where is my order" is the most common ticket in ecommerce, and I've written about automating WISMO in more detail.

Real Willdesk costs for three kinds of stores

Plan grids hide the part that matters, so here's what Willdesk pricing does to three stores. All Willdesk numbers come from the pricing page and the AI help article.

A candle shop answering 80 conversations a month, no AI. Basic 100 at $16.90 a month, or $141.96 for the first year if paid up front ($11.83 a month). That buys a shared inbox for email and chat, unlimited seats and order tracking. This is where Willdesk is cheapest, and it's why reviewers call it affordable.

An apparel store answering 400 conversations a month, AI on. The cheapest fit is Basic 300 plus 100 extra conversations: $29.90 + $12 + $80 of AI = $121.90 a month, about 30 cents a conversation. The same store on Chatty Pro ($68.99 with 500 AI conversations) would pay less for the AI chat itself, but Chatty is a chat widget, not a multi-channel inbox.

A multi-store brand answering 3,000 conversations a month, AI on. Pro 3,000 at $209.90 plus $600 of AI = $809.90 a month. Paid yearly, the plan part drops to $1,763.16 for the first year, but the AI part isn't shown as discounted anywhere. At this size, the AI line is three quarters of the bill, and that's when I'd compare per-conversation AI prices across vendors, not plan prices.

Paying yearly has a catch, too. The pricing page labels the 30% off as a "Discount for the first year," so budget for full price from year two. One long-time user also hit a billing mix-up on the annual plan:

"I've been using this app for over a year, and even after subscribing to an annual plan, it still charges $30 every month."

Crystals Wholesale USA, Shopify App Store

Channelwill replied that the billing issue was resolved. If you switch to annual, check your next two Shopify invoices for a leftover recurring charge, which is good practice with any app.

The free plan and the trial

The Free plan is a real plan, not a countdown: 20 answered conversations a month, unlimited seats, 1 store, live chat, email, a contact form, macros and a help center with unlimited articles. A tiny store or a brand-new one can run on it. A 2024 reviewer put it well:

"Both in the free version and in the basic version, you can go a long way as a small business in offering service to your customers."

LievKaart, Shopify App Store

The limits show up in automation. Willdesk's help center says free users can't use workflow templates, and since every new workflow starts from a template, Free can't build workflows at all. Uploading a website logo to the chat widget also needs Basic. And the AI gets 10 one-time uses before it switches off.

On trials, the two sources disagree. The listing shows a "7-day free trial" on Basic and Pro. The FAQ on willdesk.com answers "Do you have trial for paid plan?" with "No, we do not have trial for any paid plan." I'd treat the Free plan as your trial and use it to test the parts you'd pay for: email setup, order tracking and how the widget looks on your theme. My checklist for testing an AI agent before launch covers the AI side, using those 10 free AI uses on your hardest questions.

Refunds go through Shopify. Willdesk's refund FAQ says it can refund through the Shopify backend once an invoice exists, and for charges not yet billed, you start with Shopify Support.

Where the website and the Shopify listing disagree

I compared willdesk.com and the Shopify listing line by line. The base prices match. The rest doesn't always.

None of these change the price you're charged for conversations. The trial and the first-year discount are the two I'd confirm with Willdesk's chat before subscribing, because they change what the first months cost. One small slip: on the annual view, Basic 500's crossed-out "before" price reads $634.80, but 12 months at $42.90 is $514.80. The $360.36 you'd pay is correct for 30% off $514.80.

How Willdesk pricing compares

Here's Willdesk next to other Shopify support tools, by the unit each one bills on. Prices come from each vendor's own page, checked this month for my posts on Chatty, MooseDesk and SmartBot pricing.

The pattern: Willdesk is the cheapest way here to get a multi-channel inbox with unlimited seats. With AI on every conversation, it lands in the middle of the pack per conversation. For more options, my roundups of Shopify chatbot apps, AI live chat apps and AI helpdesks for Shopify go wider, and my guide to AI customer service cost compares the billing models.

If you're weighing the bigger helpdesks, Gorgias pricing, Re:amaze pricing and Richpanel pricing are the ones Shopify stores usually stack Willdesk against.

When Willdesk's pricing stops fitting

Willdesk prices two things: a helpdesk, and an AI you switch on inside it. The helpdesk part is cheap and fair. The AI part is where the bill grows, and it grows with your plan size rather than with what the AI resolves.

That pricing fits a store that's happy to move its whole support operation into Willdesk. It fits less well when the store already runs Gorgias, Zendesk or Freshdesk and only wants better AI on the tickets it already has. Switching inboxes to get an AI agent means migrating macros, rules and history, and the help center is full of setup steps for each channel.

eesel is built for that second case. It's an AI helpdesk teammate that joins the queue you already have, connects to Shopify for orders and the catalog, and learns from your past tickets as well as your help center. It also has a chat bubble for the storefront and works on WhatsApp. Before it replies to anyone, you can run it on past tickets and read what it would have said.

The billing unit is simpler. Per eesel's pricing page, a ticket or a chat is 1 credit, however long it runs and however many orders the agent looks up, with no separate AI fee. Plans start at $299 a month for 500 credits and go up to $1,749 for 5,000, and tickets the agent stays out of don't count. Two Shopify stores running it on a multi-channel queue:

• Rúngne sells climbing apparel and runs three eesel agents on Gorgias. Between August 8 and September 8, 2026, eesel handled about 2,100 tickets across email, live chat and social, tagged about 880, left about 580 drafts for the team and sent about 440 public replies.
• Question Beauty answers Messenger, email and chat in Gorgias in the customer's language. In the same month, eesel handled about 990 tickets, sent about 960 replies and looked up about 290 Shopify orders before answering.

I'll be straight about price. A store answering 100 conversations a month will pay far less on Willdesk Basic, even with AI on, than on eesel's $299 plan. eesel makes sense when your queue is already in a helpdesk and the hours go into tickets that need an order looked up, a policy checked and a careful reply. My comparison of eesel vs Gorgias AI goes deeper on that trade.

Try eesel on your Shopify helpdesk

Looking at Willdesk pricing because your support load is growing? Check where the hours go. If you want a cheap shared inbox with unlimited seats, Willdesk is a strong pick. If your tickets already sit in Gorgias, Zendesk or Freshdesk and you want AI that reads the Shopify order before it replies, eesel works that queue where it is, and the AI is in the credit price. You can run it on your past tickets first and start with 100 free credits, no card needed.

Try eesel free, or see how the Shopify integration works.