Email-first shared inbox with a simple $0.75 AI agent for founders who live in email
Ideal if email is your main channel, with the catch that it answers questions rather than doing ecommerce jobs for you.
Setup: Under 1 hour · Control: Acts + logs everything
Visit Help Scout AI Answers (Envoy) ↗ Compare all answer customers agents
Help Scout is an email-first shared inbox with live chat through its Beacon widget, a Docs knowledge base, and an AI agent that the pricing page now markets as Envoy, long known as AI Answers. It answers in chat and can help deflect email volume by resolving common questions from your Docs articles, your website and other sources you connect. For a solo founder that shape matters: most small businesses still get more support by email than by chat, and Help Scout was designed for that reality rather than for a large contact centre. You configure the sources, set tone and boundaries, and the agent resolves a conversation only when the customer gets an answer and does not ask for more help — that is also the moment you are charged. It does not pretend to be a full operations agent. It will not natively run a refund in Shopify or chase a carrier, though it sits alongside 100-plus apps and your human inbox for those jobs. Handoff is its strength: the customer is always one click from a person, the conversation lands in your inbox with context, and you can cap AI spending monthly so a busy month cannot surprise you. AI Drafts and Summarize on Plus help you answer what the AI leaves behind.
Per seat for the Help Scout inbox PLUS $0.75 per AI resolution — you pay the seat even in months the AI resolves little
| Plan | Published price |
|---|---|
| Standard | $25 per user/mo billed annually ($30/mo monthly) |
| Plus | $45 per user/mo billed annually ($54/mo monthly) |
| Pro | $75 per user/mo billed annually ($90/mo monthly) |
| Envoy / AI Answers add-on | $0.75 /resolution |
Integrations we verified: Shopify, WooCommerce, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, Jira, Zapier
Easiest first AI agent for a solo shop — learns your help pages and answers chat and email in minutes
The best starting point for most solo shops, with the catch that you pay for the inbox and the AI as two separate products.
One flat workspace price for chat, email and social — AI credits included, no per-seat shock
The most budget-predictable option if you adopt its inbox, with the catch that the useful AI starts at $95, not $45.
The benchmark AI agent — best answers and actions, priced per outcome on top of a seat
Pick Fin if answer quality matters more than price, with the catch that a solo pays $227 a month at 200 resolutions before any add-ons.
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