Help Scout Pricing 2026: Standard, Plus, Free Plan

Help Scout plans and prices

Help Scout offers two main plans: Standard at $22/agent/mo and Plus at $44/agent/mo. Both are billed annually. The minimum on Standard is 3 agents, so the floor is $66/month.

Standard covers shared inboxes, the Docs knowledge base, the Beacon live chat widget, CSAT surveys, and basic reporting. Plus adds advanced reporting, custom fields, Salesforce and HubSpot integrations, and API access.

The startup free plan

Help Scout for Startups is free for companies under 1 year old with less than $1 million in funding. You get full Standard plan features at no cost for 6 months, then 90% off for the following 6 months.

The startup program is real and well-run. If you qualify, apply. It is a legitimate way to run support properly without the cost burden in early stages.

No add-on pricing is the actual selling point

Help Scout does not sell AI features as add-ons, does not charge per conversation, and does not gate basic reporting behind a higher tier. The simplicity of the pricing model is itself a feature.

Compare to Zendesk, where a comparable setup with QA and AI costs $190+/agent/mo. Help Scout Plus at $44 covers a lot of the same daily workflow for support teams that do not need enterprise routing complexity.

Frequently asked questions

Does Help Scout really have zero AI fees? Not entirely. AI Answers, Help Scout's customer-facing AI feature, is billed separately at $0.75 per resolution. The base seat pricing itself has no markup, but budget for this add-on if you plan to use AI deflection at volume.

What happens when I add a 26th agent on the Standard plan? You are forced to upgrade to the Plus plan, which jumps the per-user rate from about $25 to $45, roughly an 80% increase per seat. Plan your tier around expected headcount growth, not just your current team size.

Is the 16% annual billing discount applied to everything? No. The annual discount applies only to user seat costs. Add-ons like extra inboxes ($10/month annual, $12/month billed monthly), extra Docs sites ($20/month annual, $24/month monthly), and AI Answers resolutions are charged at full price regardless of billing frequency.

How much does Help Scout cost for a 10-person team? On Standard at roughly $25/user/month, a 10-person team runs about $250/month. Moving to Plus at $45/user/month for the same team would run about $450/month, before any AI Answers usage.

Does Help Scout's startup program still exist in 2026? Vendor startup programs change terms over time, so confirm current eligibility (typically company age and funding thresholds) directly on Help Scout's pricing page before assuming the previously advertised terms still apply.

Is Help Scout cheaper than Zendesk for a small team? Yes, substantially. Help Scout Standard starts around $25/user/month with no mandatory AI add-on markup baked into seat price, while a comparable Zendesk setup with QA and AI commonly runs $190+/agent/month once add-ons are included.